The United Nations has clammed up tighter than a conch in mudslide in the face of questions surrounding the use by Kofi Annan’s relatives of a Mitchell-Lama apartment on Roosevelt Island. The apartment had been used by Mr. Annan himself and his wife in the years before he became secretary-general, Claudia Rosett reported in the Sun on Tuesday. The moment her story hit the streets the Internet lit up, and within hours hundreds of thousands of people had read the dispatch. The breadth of the interest in the story confirms our sense that it is about more than the details of the Mitchell-Lama Housing program, because it illuminates the hollowness of the preaching that goes on in the world body.

As Ms. Rosett’s article noted, Mr. Annan “has spent years lecturing Americans on how the well-heeled have obligations to those less fortunate.” Now it turns out he and his family had been occupying one of the apartments that the state of New York has set aside for those unable to afford market-rate housing. Our Benny Avni followed up yesterday with a dispatch suggesting that North Korean diplomats may also have been taking advantage of housing built with subsidies from New York taxpayers.

The subsidies are not insignificant. Ms. Rosett reported that the Annan apartment would rent for $2,000 a month as opposed to $4,500 a month. The discount is conveyed as a subsidy from New York taxpayers by several methods. Under the terms of the 1955 New York law sponsored by a state senator from Manhattan, MacNeil Mitchell, and an assemblyman from Brooklyn, Alfred Lama, the buildings were financed by state and city bonds, whose interest is tax-free. They were also offered property tax abatements. Profit margins were artificially capped, further limiting the tax revenue from the developments. Given that New York taxpayers carry the highest state and local tax burden in the nation, it’s hard to see the logic of making serving as a landlord to the Annan family a reduced-tax activity.

Especially if some of those family members are not even New York taxpayers themselves, but, as Ms. Rosett’s dispatch suggests, diplomats or diplomatic spouses who are primarily based elsewhere, such as, say, the embassy of Ghana in Morocco. The argument used by those who want the United Nations to stay in New York City is that the diplomatic community here is a net economic benefit. One of the things we love about New York is that it has an international flavor and vitality, but it seems to us that those qualities are supplied quite adequately as it is by immigrants and tourists — both of which we’d welcome more. New Yorkers already complain of the unpaid parking tickets of diplomats; if they are going to start sopping up our “affordable” housing, it will be just one more strike against a United Nations whose reputation has already been eroded in the minds of New Yorkers by its anti-Israel bias, its corruption, and its failure to act on key issues.

If there is a silver lining to this cloud, it is that by stretching to exploit any potential loophole in the city’s below-market housing supply, the diplomats are acting like native New Yorkers. Assimilation has a way of making inroads in the most unexpected ways. Give the Annan family a few generations, we’d like to think, and there will be a grandson of the secretary-general who is a taxpaying American citizen — perhaps living in a formerly Mitchell-Lama apartment that has gone market-rate — who will start thinking about these abuses (and the United Nations itself) the way ordinary New Yorkers do.