Location. Location. Location.

And the hits keep coming here in New York.

This time, it's my congressman, Charles Rangel, who's somehow managed to avail himself of four rent-stablized apartments in a city where rent stabilized apartments are as rare as Republicans in an ethics seminar.

I have to tell you that this pisses me right off. I have a schoolteacher friend who was recently pushed out of her rent stabilized apartment. I know two other people who could effortlessly afford to live in one of the "luxury" condominiums that line our fair streets, but who live in rent stabilized apartments due to the lame, fat-cat-friendly "luxury de-control" rules this city implemented a few years back. It's increasingly difficult -- near-impossible, actually -- for anyone earning less than six figures annually to live here and I can tell you that the city is worse for it. A bunch of boorish hedge fund hangers-on, drunken trustafarians, and jaded Euro-wielding zillionaires moving zombie-like between Coach store, Marc Jacobs boutique, and celebrity-chef-of-the-week boîte does not a community make.

Part of me reads this story and gets frustrated. The NYT obviously spent a lot of time digging into Charlie Rangel's personal life to expose this particular injustice. I wish they'd spent half as much time into Judy Miller's back in the day. But I'm going to table that. If Rangel doesn't fit within the luxury-decontrol rules, he ought to give up those apartments. With a net worth upwards of $500,000 he can afford it -- and then maybe four households that couldn't otherwise afford to live here can stay.