So, as a landlord (I bought a house with more bedrooms than I need, which I fill with roommates, and I help my mother rent out her lake cabin up north), here’s the trick/explanation for how (I’d guess) they’re able to keep it cheap:
Many tenants are the most horrible, disgusting, destructive people you can imagine. They cost way, way more in damages than they pay in rent, and the way that you make your money is because the property is leveraged through debt, which is tax deductible if you rent it out, but not if you don’t, and the tax savings can make up for the damage, usually. But not in the worst cases. And since the worst cases keep getting kicked out of places or feuding with neighbors, they’re most of the applicants. There are three ways to deal with this (four, if you count “not having any tenants,” but then you’re just a real estate speculator, and you aren’t helping solve the housing crisis at all, if anything, the opposite):
1) Keep rent high enough that you can pay for the damage for the average tenant. This is usually less than you’d think. People who can pay more rent usually aren’t as shitty. (Well, in their long-term dwellings. The comfortably well-off can still be super super shitty to vacation housing.) So, if you raise the rent a little, the quality of tenant goes up a bunch (with diminishing returns), and you eventually find a nice balance.
2) Make sure there’s nothing valuable there for them to destroy. You can’t break what’s already dilapidated. People who pick this option are called “slum lords,” and while I get it, lots of people wind up in their housing who wouldn’t have been shitty, and being shitty to your business partners first, as a preventive measure, is a pretty dishonorable way to conduct yourself. I can’t say that I don’t recommend this, under the wrong circumstances, but I probably wouldn’t be the friend of someone who does this.
3) This is what I do, and what I’d guess your landlord does: Make rent kind-of high in the first year, security deposit super, super high, and then cut the rent as much as you can in subsequent years, but only for people you get good vibes from, and maybe don’t renew people you don’t. Do your walk-through, or whatever, and people who are taking care of little maintenance things on their own? Who don’t have visible food-rot on the counters? Who aren’t the cause of noise complaints? Maybe send them the same contract again without the inflation adjustment. Maybe keep doing that year-after-year. Maybe do what you can to make sure they don’t go away.
So of-freaking-course they let you have a garden! Not because they like gardens. (Maybe they do, maybe not.) But because they love tenants who are the sort of people who garden.
Remember, some of what you’re paying in rent is for housing. Most of it is you subsidizing, in expectation, people way shittier than you to their surroundings. (In much the same way that most of what you’re paying in health insurance is subsidizing, in expectation, people way sicker than you.)
