> It's the slow burn neglect shit that's almost impossible to get fixed.

There are definitely tons of pros that come from renting from small/individual landlords (e.g., potentially tiny/non-existent monthly rental cost increases over the years; I have an acquaintance who managed to keep the same lease price [which was already extremely low for the neighborhood] for about 3 years now in LES neighborhood of Manhattan).

However, what you described is precisely one of my biggest personal concerns, hence why I tend to stick with larger/property-management-company-run properties+buildings that are, in general, newer. I discovered that it is much easier to get property management companies to get things like that done. In fact, after some of my current neighbors complained enough about elevator outages over the past month (for context: the building is 30 floors tall and has 3 elevators, but we recently had multiple weeks where only one elevator was functional, which led to large elevator lines and slow service), everyone automatically got a $500 credit applied to their next rent payment.