Over time, it acquired a latticework of state and federal subsidies for low-, moderate- and middle-income tenants.

The corporation charges a 3 percent fee to developers and uses that to subsidize apartments at other sites for low- and middle-income tenants.

The condition for larger buildings would be that a percentage of the units go to low- and middle-income tenants.

A law to preserve apartments for middle-income tenants here is drawing the ire of landlords.

The new plan would require that the lower-cost units remain permanently affordable to lower- and middle-income tenants, even after the tax break expires.

He says he knows of at least one "middle-income" tenant who qualified 20 years ago but now earns $750,000 a year.

Having the market-rate units, she said, also serves to bring middle-income tenants into an area.

The complex has a series of rules to set aside apartments for moderate- and middle-income tenants.

She said that on the residential front, the city was often bankrolling the evictions of low and middle-income tenants to make way for new luxury apartments.

Most of the latter, it reported, would be under the city's ambitious 10-year plan to produce 83,000 new or renovated housing units for poor and middle-income tenants.