It is understandable that Mayor Bloomberg wants to do some damage control in New York’s forgotten borough. He did, after all, win office with a good amount of support from Staten Island Republicans. And relations between the mayor and Republican leaders in Richmond hasn’t always been the best. After Mr. Bloomberg called the Republican City Council members into his office to ask them to support his 18.5% tax increase, they instead voted against and hung tea bags from their microphones in a reference to the Boston Tea Party. Then, in January, Staten Island City Council members James Oddo and Andrew Lanza stormed out of a Gracie Mansion dinner after Mr. Bloomberg vowed to lend political and, potentially, fund-raising support to incumbent Democrats who found themselves in political danger for supporting his tax hike. Still, none of this presents a compelling reason for the mayor to join ranks with those opposed to development in Staten Island — especially as the city and the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation spend millions on building “affordable” housing.

A day after the mayor, the governor, and the secretary of the federal department of housing and urban development announced that the LMDC will allocate $50 million in federal funding to create 300 units of housing for moderate-income New Yorkers, Mr. Bloomberg was off to the south of Lower Manhattan, deploring the construction of some townhouses. “Each of these homes, they’re probably 15 feet, 14 feet wide, they’re going to sell for $400,000, people are going to be on top of each other,” said the mayor of Manhattan, where people routinely live on top of one another in structures called apartment houses. Moreover, it seems passing strange to have the mayor of a city with a housing crunch and in need of a tax base complaining about people building houses.

While the builders on the site, D.I.A. Construction, didn’t want to talk to our reporter, it seems safe to speculate that they might have had a good chuckle if they heard the mayor’s comment: “I don’t think there’s any administration that understands the need for the free market to allocate and to let the public express its will as much as this administration.”

It’s a good bet that the owner of that construction company, and whoever is developing those townhouses, has a better idea of the benefits of the free market than our mayor. These people are the free market, and they are allocating. And the public will express its will when members of the public purchase these new homes, in which they will live and go to work and send their children to school and build better lives for themselves.

The mayor may be able to score points with those who are dismayed that Staten Island is the city’s fastest-growing borough and the state’s fastest-growing county by decrying what has been called “overdevelopment” by the borough’s president. But if the island is growing too fast for its infrastructure, the solution isn’t to stop the growth but to grow the infrastructure. Messrs. Oddo and Lanza may stroke the mayor today for his reactionary remarks today, but future generations on Staten Island will look back in disgust if Mr. Bloomberg is permitted to put the brakes on the sort of growth of which the mayor’s own borough has grown envious.