While I will never promise it will work, I can promise you it has worked even in the height of Covid.

Send a kind letter asking to be exempt from to rest increase, using your history of being a good tenant. See what happened. Worst they can do is say no.

I was sending letters in DMs to people here and on other subs last year. the short is our rent went up 300$ and we asked to go month to month (to try and move out) and to remove our pet fee because rent was just too much.

We kept the pet fee, went month to month, and got our rent LOWERED. We are in great terms with our property manager and our maintenance team, most of them just want to do their job and not deal with assholes.

The reality is a great tenant with slightly less rent is more valuable than a shitty tenant leaving and finding a new (hopefully less shitty) tenant, and all the costs AND RISK that is incurred with that. We were only able to close on a house because of this letter and the money we saved.