Eileen White Read’s Jan. 11 commentary, “Santa Barbara’s Sky-High Rents Are Creating the Class War,” is not as insightful as she thinks it is.
If the former Wall Street Journal reporter and her attorney husband are so concerned about the outrageous rents that “saintly mom-and-pop” apartment owners like me need to charge to repair and maintain them, surely they won’t mind if my tenants move in with them when I take my four-unit building off the market if the Santa Barbara City Council passes its rent controls.
Our small, neatly kept property has been in my family for more than 70 years. I’ve kept two of the units empty since the COVID-19 rent freezes because the economics didn’t work for my middle-class income to fill the vacancies and meet the necessary upkeep. I will have no choice but to do the same when the other two come up.
But I really am sorry that Read had to drive 13 miles to Goleta to get her vacuum cleaner fixed.
S. Ramos
Santa Barbara
• • •
How did Eileen White Read get hired by The Wall Street Journal with such a limited understanding of economics?
John Christensen
Solvang
• • •
Please! Ditch the letter to the editor length warning. These letters are getting longer and longer, and publishing them just encourages even longer ones.
Why not just put a mandatory rule limiting length and see what happens? If no one writes letters as a result, just remove the rule and go back to allowing these lengthy tomes.
Brevity is the soul of wit, and overly long letters are not funny.
Stephen Weiss
Montecito
• • •
Mail Calls
Noozhawk welcomes and encourages expressions of all views on Santa Barbara County issues. Click here to submit a letter to the editor.
Letters should be BRIEF — as in 200 words-BRIEF — and letters under 150 words are given priority. Each must include a valid mailing address and contact information. Pseudonyms will not be accepted, and repeat letters will be skipped. Letters may be edited for clarity, length and style.
As a hyperlocal news site, we ask that you keep your opinions and information relevant to Santa Barbara County and the Central Coast. Letters about issues beyond our local region have the absolute lowest priority of everything we publish.
With rare exceptions, this feature is published on Saturdays.
By submitting any content to Noozhawk, you warrant that the material is your original expression, free of plagiarism, and does not violate any copyright, proprietary, contract or personal right of anyone else. Noozhawk reserves, at our sole discretion, the right to choose not to publish a submission.
Click here for Noozhawk’s Terms of Use, and click here for more information about how to submit letters to the editor and other announcements, tips and stories.