Democratic Candidates Recall Their Humbler Abodes

The Democratic candidates for mayor have heard it all: tirades about rent control, inquiries about the ethics of closing schools, and gotcha questions about favorite boroughs.

But they seemed startled — nervous, even — when a political-science professor posed a question central to the lives of many New Yorkers: When did you last live in a rental apartment, and what was the rent?

For the five candidates gathered around a table at the Goddard Riverside Community Center on the Upper West Side on Thursday, the predicament was clear.

Many now live in some of the city’s most affluent neighborhoods, with homes worth over $1 million.
But each is seeking to one-up the others in a race to be seen as the candidate of the common New Yorker.

Sal F. Albanese, 63, a former city councilman from Brooklyn, seized the opportunity. While he now lives in a $1 million home in Bay Ridge, he said he had once lived in Park Slope — in 1969, “when it was a working-class neighborhood,” he said — for $60 a month.

Cheers and clapping broke out in the auditorium, where over 150 people gathered for a candidate forum sponsored by the center and Community Free Democrats, a Manhattan political club.

Bill de Blasio, 51, the city’s public advocate, said he last rented an apartment from 1992 to 1998 in Park Slope, for $1,800 a month. “That’s a lot,” several audience members murmured.

(On Friday, a spokesman for Mr. de Blasio called to say that the candidate had misremembered and that his rent had actually been $1,000.)

Mr. de Blasio grew to love the area so much that he bought a home there with his wife when their second child was born. The home is now valued at $1.1 million.

John C. Liu, 46, the city comptroller, said that in 1993 he paid $700 a month for a place in Queens, his longtime home. Later, he and his wife purchased a home in Flushing, now valued at $830,000.
“It was actually really cheap at the time,” Mr. Liu said.

Christine C. Quinn, 46, the Council speaker, who leads in polls, said she paid $900 a month when she moved into a rent-stabilized apartment in Chelsea in 1992. She was paying $2,000 a month when she left the apartment to move into a $1.3-million home she and her partner bought nearby in 2011.

William C. Thompson Jr., 59, a former city comptroller who ran for mayor in 2009, lives in the most expensive property of all the Democratic candidates, a $1.8-million town house in Harlem.

But he indicated on Thursday that he used to live far more humbly. In 1982, he rented a home on Carroll Street in Brooklyn for $600 a month.

“As a matter of fact, it was a great apartment,” Mr. Thompson said.

One commonality: so many candidates said they had once lived in Park Slope that Kenneth Sherrill, a former Hunter College professor who moderated the forum, joked that the neighborhood was a “cradle of candidates.”