By Josh Barbanel, The New York Times.

The idea that anyone, let alone Representative Charles B. Rangel, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, could live in more than one rent-stabilized apartment — and be paying less than the increasingly high market-rate rents in Manhattan — may sound shocking today.

But lawyers who represent landlords and tenants in the Alice in Wonderland world of rent stabilization say that in past decades landlords routinely allowed tenants to rent more than one apartment without a whimper of public protest. The concept is even enshrined in state rent regulations.

Mr. Rangel last year paid $3,894 a month for four apartments in Lenox Terrace, a vast private development built in 1958 on a site created through a slum-clearance program, before the dispiriting decline of Harlem in the 1960s and 1970s. It is between Lenox and Fifth Avenues and West 132nd and West 135th Streets.

After his housing arrangements became known, Mr. Rangel denied that he had a “sweetheart deal.” He said that two of the apartments had been combined for a prior tenant, a prominent Harlem minister, long before he moved in, and that a third, a studio, was added later. He said he would give up the fourth apartment, a one-bedroom on a different floor, which he used as a campaign office.

Sherwin Belkin, a lawyer who represents building owners, said a series of court cases in the late 1980s established the right of tenants to keep multiple apartments, even on different floors, if they were used as part of a combined primary residence.

He said that until 1993, when the state established a system to allow more expensive apartments to go to market rents, building owners had no way out of rent regulation, and they frequently preferred combining vacant apartments and renting them to “good tenants who paid rent on time.”

At that time, “there was not a significant difference in the amount of money an owner could receive by renting to an existing tenant,” he said. “Now, there is a significant difference.”

Samuel J. Himmelstein, a tenant lawyer, said disputes began to arise in the 1980s when landlords wanted to regain control of apartments during a wave of condominium conversions and redevelopments.

When he handled one case, involving combining two apartments, he came across another case in which a tenant had four separate apartments, each atop the next in a small building, and was permitted to keep them all.

The state housing department addressed the issue in 1994, stating that landlords looking to deregulate combined apartments could usually use the combined rent in their recalculations.

Even Mr. Rangel’s campaign office apartment, which he is giving up, might still be considered part of his primary residence, if he could show that the apartment was more like a home office, like one used by a psychologist to see patients, than a commercial business office.

Mr. Rangel’s landlord could challenge his right to the apartment if his annual adjusted gross income was more than $175,000 for two years, lawyers say. (It is not certain that such a challenge could succeed.)

But James Fishman, a consumer rights lawyer, said that Mr. Rangel’s situation pointed out a fact surrounding many tenant cases. If Mr. Rangel were forced out of his apartment, the landlord would most likely be able to renovate and “flip it,” he said, as a market-rate apartment, rather than renting it to another rent-stabilized tenant.

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