These things happen in high COL areas. Of course the rents are going to rise when people are willing to pay more. This is supply demand. In a lot of cases, property taxes are assessed based on the value, and the people renting and paying the higher rent are actually making more money than the landlord. Also you don't blame companies for charging you for a product that you like the price they do, considering that it takes much, much less to actually make it - are those companies being greedy?
People get displaced, move outside of the area, and find places to live. In some cases, they buy houses in rural areas for a lower cost, and then 5-6 years later the gentrification radius grows and their house goes up in value. Look at Northern Virginia for example of this.
The main that is missing is good public transport system (or government level investment in autonomous driving). In Europe, its natural to commute about an hour or so to work, often from a different town to a bigger city. In US this happens as well, the difference though is that you have to sit in traffic in a car.
Property taxes went up, materials and labor for maintenance went up, and if you bought your rental property during that time, prices were going up, each increasing the costs for many landlords.
What about the landlords that bought property twenty years ago, when prices weren't going up? What's their excuse?
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Their excuse is that they, as landlords, will charge as much for rent as they get away with, regardless of what their expenses may or may not be. Two identical apartments, owned by two different landlords, one of which costs its owner ~$1000/month, and the other ~$1,500/month will both be rented out for essentially the same price.
There's no need to spill ink on moralizing and justifying why rent's going up. It's going up because you (or someone else) has the money to pay for it to go up, and because you have limited alternatives.
Then how do you explain the massive number of evictions and hockey-stick rise in rent prices from 2010-2020 without blaming greedy landlords?
"Oopsie doopsie rents fell up?"