And higher rent means the valuation of the property goes up. All the incentives are there for them to do this, we just all need to really convince ourselves they would never do such a thing.
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If someone can figure out the con on a message board unrelated to real estate I'm pretty sure investors financing this stuff could figure it out as well
If they did the math after all the various factors are considered and this happened, then clearly this is the best play from their perspective. It's not even malice it's just "economic sense", except the way the economics works out just happens to screw people with barely enough money to afford rent.
That still doesn't mean they're not culpable under the textbook legal definition of collusion.
Louis Rossmann has made numerous videos about vacant properties where asking prices for rent are significantly above what he considers to be market value. Notably, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdfmMB1E_qk and the Reddit post which that video comments on: https://www.reddit.com/r/nyc/comments/innhah/comment/g4ai27m...
The TL;DR is that there's weak evidence that the contractual conditions attached to financing from investors who seek high risk and high reward makes those landlords ignore local market conditions and incentivizes those landlords to leave commercial units vacant instead of renting them out at market value.