I do know they definitely still can do credit checks and income requirements on rent-stabilized. :/

I remember when I was in my first apartment, when rent control was starting to be phased out, that my landlord sent me a letter, in the middle of the lease term, that demanded a 150% increase in rent, right away.

And also demanded that I send them enough money to increase the amount of the security deposit to match the new rent they wanted to charge.

Now this didn’t seem right to me, so I went to city hall and talked to some people who seemed terribly overworked.

They listened, and (since it was apparently not an isolated incident) they had a packet already made up, under City letterhead, spelling out the *state* laws that govern, so that the landlord could not say that the city laws let him do what he was trying.

Of course, it helped that I had a cousin who was working for the Mayor, so I didn’t have to do a bureaucratic shuffle trying to find the right office.

Fast forward more than a few years, there is no effective rent control or stabilization in the city of Boston. My mother, then a woman aged 89,on a fixed pension (and not a big one either) was informed that when her lease expired, she would have to come up with triple the rent she had been paying for the last decade. And she had been in that apartment since at least 1973.

The children of the prior owner wanted to convert as many units to condos as they could. And this was the way they saw to force people out.