Bianca Jagger

Bianca Jagger plays the villain in the latest free-market morality play.  read more »

We noted last week that Bianca Jagger was getting evicted from her rent-stabilized Park Avenue apartment over visa problems (she's a Brit).

A New York Sun editorial asks today: "... why should the taxpayers of New York have provided a wealthy woman for more than 20 years the benefit of a below-market-rate Park Avenue apartment?"

Curbed answers back, though, with one of the most coldly thorough defenses ever of rent-stabilization, which keeps about 1 million apartments in the city below market rate:

No harm no foul, and here's the thing: We all would have done the exact same thing. Lucking into a rent-stabilized Park Avenue apartment is like winning the lottery, without having all those crazy problems that lottery winners all wind up with for some reason. If suddenly you could afford the market-rate rent, would you want to give up the stabilized rate? ... The system is one giant corrupt game, and we all look for ways to take advantage. Kudos to ol' Bianca for holding on to her place for so long.

Bianca Jagger, who survived several years of marriage to Mick in the 1970's only to lose him to a Texan, is getting evicted from her rent-stabilized apartment on Park Avenue.

Ms. Jagger's landlord had sued her, claiming the apartment could not be her primary residence because she was in the United States on a tourist visa. Ms. Jagger is a British citizen and has another apartment in London. For her part, Ms. Jagger claimed the landlord only sued her because she sued the landlord in 2003 over mold in the apartment.

Either way, there's one more market-rate apartment in New York City and one less stabilized one. Light a candle and play Let It Bleed.