Readers with excessive rent hikes question columnist's opposition to rent control

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.

Hanna Hill, a reader from Plymouth, suggested in an email that Minneapolis and St. Paul place controls on existing rental properties but create 10- or 15-year exemptions for new ones.

That's basically what St. Paul has evolved to, but that still creates too much uncertainty for builders and the banks that finance them. They want 30 years — the length of a typical mortgage — to be assured they will be able to recover their investments.

A half-dozen readers wrote or called to criticize me for writing in that column, "City Council candidates are not saying much about" rent control.

One friend who lives in Minneapolis told me I'd set up a straw man argument, which I never want to do. He told me he'd just heard council candidates talking about it in an open forum a few days before the column appeared.

The criticism is justified and I was wrong. Council candidates were and are talking about rent control, in meetings with voters, in their campaign literature and in response to journalists.

In the online comments section of my Oct. 22 column about rural broadband, the suggestion appeared again and again that people in parts of Minnesota without access to broadband could subscribe to the Starlink satellite service, which is offered by Elon Musk's SpaceX venture.

That indeed is an option, though, as several commenters noted, not as reliable as optical fiber. Starlink dishes need what's known as "line of sight" access to a satellite. Trees and hills can get in the way.

To my notion in the Oct. 18 column that demand for weight-loss drugs might produce a fundamental change in prescription prices, one commenter wrote, "You're dreaming Mr. Ramstad." And while that may prove to be true, it's still worth dreaming.

A few days after that column appeared, the New York Times published a story that said the net prices of weight-loss drugs were lower than the marketed price, and they will come under further pressure from new competition. That's different from the consumer and government pressure I speculated about.

A top executive of a Twin Cities med-tech firm noted via email that drug prices are high not just because of the costs of research and innovation, as I described in that column. "They are also to account for U.S. regulatory requirements and a litigious legal system," he wrote.

Responding to my Sept. 6 and Oct. 11 columns watching Hamline University students use ChatGPT in their classes, Christopher Glenn of Roseville wrote an email comparing the students' experience with his when calculators were first being used in classrooms. He added that he used ChatGPT to edit his note to me.

"It made some minor revisions for clarity and grammar," he wrote. "I disagreed and undid all its suggestions because you couldn't hear my voice with its edits."

Finally, many of my newsroom colleagues liked that I "got personal" by starting my Sept. 20 column about the changes in Delta's SkyMiles program with a tale of a dating heartbreak 20 years ago. And some expressed disappointment that I didn't reveal what happened to the woman in the story.

I'm happy to still be her friend and, 10 years ago, to have had a role in her wedding.