The hard thing about writing your opinions in public is not that they will clash with the ideas or opinions of readers. That's to be expected.
It's the knowledge that no matter what I think about a situation, someone else is going to experience it differently.
The most challenging email and phone calls to me in recent weeks came from readers who, responding to my Oct. 8 column against rent control, described troubles with landlords or big rent increases.
In one email, a woman from Minneapolis described living in Uptown for 12 years before being priced out by rising rents, then moving to a studio apartment in the Lyndale neighborhood and seeing the rent for it climb to just under $1,000.
"Once enough rents in a neighborhood get overly inflated, it seems that other landlords start to look around and think the new prices they're seeing must be the 'going rate' and start to try to match those prices," she wrote. "Whether current residents of the neighborhood can afford those inflated rents doesn't matter much, because the landlords can simply draw in higher earning renters from elsewhere."
She added that she wonders how far she'll have to downsize: "A spare room in someone's house?"
I understand this pain. I experienced it as a renter, and as a current homeowner I feel it in the rising costs of maintaining my house.
And yet imposing a cap on rent doesn't make sense in a market where, in the aggregate, rents are not rising sharply and where owners and builders will stop building if they lose pricing control.