This is trivial to empirically disprove. Look at the listings for similar units in an arbitrary city. Are they all exactly the same price? No, and then the landlord who offers the lower price for an otherwise equivalent unit fills their vacancy sooner.
> They raise rents in lockstep and then offer "specials" like a month off (amortized) that lower initial out-of-pocket costs without affecting the base rent, which gets raised on subsequent lease renewals to make up the difference.
These are obviously gimmicks, but who is requiring you to fall for them? If you're planning to stay somewhere for a long time then look at the base rent and the length of the lease. Let the landlords offering "specials" and short lease terms get taken advantage of by the tenants who know they're going to be moving in a year anyway.
> The only option to avoid this is moving every year (instability being clearly great for community /s) since corporate landlords will not negotiate rates.
An obvious option to avoid this is to avoid corporate landlords. Most rental properties are owned by a "corporation" in the sense that it's an LLC for liability reasons, but that doesn't mean the ones owned by an individual who lives in the same city and has fewer units than you can count on one hand behave the same way as the ones owned by some private equity schmucks, and there are lots of the former.
Also, who wants to rent the same unit for 30 years? Renting should be for people who haven't saved a down payment yet and people who are planning to move soon. When we're seeing people in middle age who want to stay in the same place but still can't afford to buy anything there, we need to be doing something about the unaffordability of buying rather than accepting the premise that we're going to continue screwing them into needing to rent.