The disclosure, in an article on page one of today’s New York Sun by our Grace Rauh, that the speaker of the City Council, Christine Quinn, lives in a rent-stabilized apartment brings to three the number of our city’s political luminaries now disclosed to be enjoying the benefits of government-regulated below-market rate Manhattan apartments. Ms. Quinn pays $1,600 a month for a one-bedroom in Chelsea, where many market-rate apartments go for $2,000 and up. She also owns half of a four-bedroom house in New Jersey that is worth more than $500,000. She makes $141,000 a year from the City Council, and her partner is a corporate lawyer.

RELATED: Council Could Benefit on Rent As It Seeks Control of Board.

Governor Paterson, who with his wife earned a combined $270,000 last year, pays $1,250 a month for a rent-stabilized two-bedroom apartment in a Harlem building with a 24-hour doorman. Market rate for that is $2,600 a month, and Mr. Paterson and his wife also own a house in Guilderland upstate and have access to the 40-room governor’s mansion in Albany. Rep. Charles Rangel, the dean of the state’s congressional delegation, was paying $3,894 a month for four-rent stabilized apartments in the same building as Mr. Paterson, which The New York Times said was $30,000 a year below market. Mr. Rangel also owns a villa in the Dominican Republic and has also owned in the past decade a Harlem building and a Florida condominium, according to the Times.

If you are starting to see a pattern, you are correct. The city’s rent-stabilization laws create all kinds of perverse incentives. If you are a landlord who owns a rent-stabilized apartment, you have an incentive to rent it to the richest possible tenant — the one who can most easily afford to pay the rent. That may be the person who least needs the benefit of a below-market rent. If you reside in a rent-stabilized New York City apartment and you still want to invest in the real estate market, you have an incentive to buy property outside New York — a house in Guilderland, a villa in the Dominican Republic, a four-bedroom home on the Jersey Shore. The effect is that a measure originally designed to keep the lower and middle classes from being forced out of the city has become a program that effectively subsidizes country homes outside the city for the upper middle class.

We don’t mean to single out the politicians, for whom we actually have high regard, policy disagreements aside. We do not think they are any more likely than anyone in any other profession — doctors, lawyers, professors, performing artists — to take advantage of what is perfectly legal under the rules that distort our housing market. Our quarrel is with the rent laws. Ms. Quinn and Mr. Paterson, at least, by virtue of their offices, have it within their power to dismantle the system so that it no longer benefits a lucky few at the expense of newcomers while eroding New York City’s property tax base. If they fail to act while enjoying apartments at rates not available to newcomers, their own living arrangements will become part of the political debate.