Apartment-building (and home-building) isn't about the landlord making ends meet. It's about the landlord owning or borrowing a few million dollars to buy property and/or build upon it, then trying to make money over the next several decades, as he pays interest (or incurs opportunity cost), incurs maintenance expenses, pays insurance and property taxes, and watches as the investment depreciates due to the building getting old. A subsistence income is not a substitute for a real return on that investment.

Rent control substantially limits the upside potential of that sort of investment at best and usually goes further to act as a massive wealth transfer from landlord to tenant. As you can imagine, that deters investment, so housing shortages get worse and you end up either paying way too much or you just can't find an apartment to rent. (Moreover, even if rent control is eventually rolled back, the political risk that it will return is likely to haunt every future investment in the city for decades to come.)

You don't need to like landlords in general, or lionize them for their investment (the money is its own reward), or trust your landlord any further than you can throw him, but if you want people to live inside a decent piece of capital (instead of four-to-a-crappy-bedroom) then you'd do well to both study and respect the incentives that capitalism gives landlords (the money is its own reward) and how rent control distorts them.

... or you'll just screw over everyone, like New York City's War Emergency Tenant Protection Act, which continues to this day to protect certain lucky residents from World War II but resulted in something like 1/3 of the buildings in Harlem being abandoned, to say nothing of the Bronx. (and a little like today's San Francisco, though there are plenty of other barriers to new development there.)