While I was growing up my dad was a police officer that would buy properties at auction from the city of Flint. These home were not livable, they needed a lot of work. From age 10+ I would go to these properties and learn the trades helping him fix these houses up, and every time a tenant was evicted I would get to see the damage they caused and help fix it. In some cases they would rip out and scrap the plumbing and electrical wire.
My dad would prefer to lower rent instead of raise it, it rarely happened though because of how rare it was that renters would pay on time for more than a couple months. This was the 90s, so a 3-5 bedroom house was 500-700 a month. The only way he could make a profit with the tenants being so terrible was by doing most of the work ourselves.
After a certain age he sold off some of his rentals, others were so damaged by renters that he just let the city take them back. One of them the family had rented for 20 years and he just gave it to her.
I suppose landlords in bougie areas do very little, but in some poor areas renters can be incredibly destructive. And landlords in those situations actually do a great deal of work.