Yes.

>If it's not rent controlled, couldn't they just jack up the rent whenever they felt like it?

I was talking with a guy who I work with who is a landlord on the side, and he seemed to have this real labor-theory-of-value sense of fairness, like he says he jacks up rent every time his taxes or insurance or what have you goes up, but it sounds like he's like 5 years behind market (which is a huge amount)

And this is super common in California, small-time landlords, if the tenant is not causing issues, tend to raise rents rather less than market.

I think some of it is that the vast majority of your ROI, in California, comes from property appreciation, (while in many other markets, as far as I can tell, you usually get a lot more cashflow; all the places I looked at in cleveland or in new mexico would be positive cashflow out the gate; all the places I've looked at buying in California only become positive cashflow once rents go up rather a lot) - so I guess maybe some landlords feel that if they don't jack up rents too much on easy tenants, they won't have to do as much work, and as most of their income is actually appreciation on the property which happens either way, they don't see giving up some of the rent as that big of a deal?

I can tell you that if you rent from a professional property management company, your rents will go up way faster, but they are also way more responsive when it comes to fixing things, and there is a strong feeling that if the rents haven't gone up on you in a while, you want to deal with any problems yourself; you don't want to call the landlord, which is evidence in favor of the "landlords avoiding work" theory.

The thing that this theory doesn't explain is that a lot of these landlords seem to be below market by a lot more than what a property management firm would charge. (I think. around here property management companies charge more than usual and usually have really big fees for replacing a moved-out tenant)