"Legal" Rent is 3x Market Rate - How?

I had a building like that... they are newer type of stabilization (hence rents being above $2k in many cases) so that higher number is basically a joke. Essentially, as long as they stay below that upper level, they can do whatever the hell they want.

It stems from the challenges about 5 years ago relating to preferential rent. the rent control board tried to help the landlords and allow preferential rent to be taken away at each lease renewal date. There were a few court cases and it was found that as it is a contract that a landlord had no right to take away preferential rent from those who had a clause that said life of tenancy. So at this point the landlords began to rewrite the leases and make the preferential rent amount for just the lease period and then would pay with the rent each period as long as the underlying max rent was going up by the allowable increase each year.

The building i was living in as a method I believe to get a lot of the apartments to market were offering massive preferential rent the last few years and then pulling the rug out from the tenant at lease renewal forcing them to move out. They did this with a bunch of apartments.

http://www.housingnyc.com/html/resources/dhcr/dhcr40.html

My legal rent is more than 2X my actual rent too. This is common. Legally allowed rents are based on Manhattan averages, not neighborhood averages. So many units in the LES or Harlem have $6000 legal rents when the actual, market rent might $2500-$3000. Its a scame, in that the LLs get a TAX break for building "rent stabalized" units. Utter scam. So councilmembers want to revise the law so that legal rents are set by neighborhood rents, not borough-wide averages.

What happened to that guy who was leaving an apartment in Tribeca and going to a rent stabilized building nearby?