During a radio interview on WBAI Wednesday morning, Fernando Ferrer was asked what policies he would implement as mayor to solve the “crisis in homelessness.” His response? Affordable housing. He said it so fast we thought a knee had jerked out of the car radio. The night before, at the debate among Democratic mayoral candidates, all four contenders pledged their fealty to the idea of “affordable housing.” Yet only the Democratic front-runner, Fernando Ferrer, has sought to elevate rent control and other nonmarket approaches to housing from the level of misguided policy to cure-all.

“When you see women and children on the no. 6 subway because they have no home, that should offend the consciences of anyone in this city,” Mr. Ferrer said during yesterday’s interview. “The way to deal with that is to build more permanent housing.” He added: “Homelessness rises because they don’t have a place to live, and it’s that simple.”

Tautologies aside, Mr. Ferrer fails to address the fact that many reasons exist for homelessness, and stifling the city’s housing market isn’t the solution to them. According to New York’s Coalition for the Homeless, for example, around 75% of the “street homeless” suffer from “severe and persistent” mental disorders and other debilitating ailments, for which below-market rent is no cure.

Mr. Ferrer assumes, moreover, that increasing the amount of below-market units means they would be filled by the vagrants currently wandering New York’s streets. Not so, according to the author of “America’s Trillion-Dollar Housing Mistake,” Howard Husock, an authority on the ills of anti-market housing regulation.

“The people who are queuing up for subsidized housing are in housing now,” Mr. Husock told the Sun yesterday. “They’re not on the streets. They’re young single mothers doubled up with their mothers, looking to move out because they’ve had a child.” New York, Mr. Husock said, has more subsidized housing per person than any other city in the country. By Mr. Ferrer’s reasoning, New York’s “homelessness crisis” should have been eradicated decades ago.

Were Mr. Ferrer serious about using New York’s housing policy as an instrument for eliminating homelessness, he would advocate eliminating rent control entirely. Freeing up prime property in a hot real estate market would generate development jobs for the unemployed and millions of dollars in tax revenues that could provide treatment for the mentally ill, benefiting New York’s homeless far more than the redistribution of wealth ever could.