The landlord had told them he wanted to raise the rent to $3,500 and when they complained he decided to raise it to $9,500.
“We know that our building is not rent controlled and this was something we were always worried about happening and there is no way we can afford $9,500 per month," Yumna Farooq said.
Technically they could charge more. Clearly the market is willing to pay more, else scalpers could not exist. But it would require more work by the organizer to get the tickets sold, and that extra work would not necessarily be worth the added payoff. Organizers have way better things to do than to spend their days trying to look high and low for someone wanting to buy a ticket. It is beneficial to just get tickets sold as fast as possible, even if at a discount, and move on to more useful work. Those who have nothing else going on in life can justifiably spend their time looking high and low and capture the difference for their efforts.
Because there is only so much time in the day. Same reason middlemen appear in essentially every industry known to man. They let people doing important things get back to doing important things rather than waste their time dealing with people.