The skyrocketing rates for services are directly tied to the skyrocketing rent increases. The cost of performing these services does not change substantially from city to city, or else landlords renting to people in cities with more reasonably priced units would not be able to repair them. The big difference is the cost of living for the contractors, which gets passed to the people paying for repairs--and by far the largest component of cost of living in SF is rent. Like I said in the other comment, this is a largely self-imposed problem.

Yup, our three floor building was 40k to repaint and fix a few custom windows (with plastic instead of custom wrapped glass) . Hadn’t been painted in over 20 years though.

Property taxes in California are miniscule. Mortgages are only as high as they are because people assume they can extract ridiculous rents from tenants, so this is a self-made problem that should go away with sufficiently stringent rent control. The other bills do not vary significantly enough from city to city to justify the absurd rent differences between them.

So no, I'm not assuming anything of the sort. Beyond that, landlords are extremely notorious for spending much less money on repairs than they should and saddling their tenants with the bills.

Rent is far above its CPI-inflated average right now, so saying that rent increases must match inflation makes no sense. The time to do that would've been long ago. But in any case I'm pretty sure rent increases are capped at much higher than inflation.

Then they were taking a gamble by purchasing a property they couldn't actually afford, and lost. If you want risk-free investments, try bonds.

Do you think they are going up faster than rents in SF have?