As the City Council gets set to act on Sheldon Solow’s project on the East River, let us reflect for a moment on the question of what is development. Particularly because we’ve been saying, in general and in respect of Mr. Solow’s East Side renaissance, that we’re all in favor of development. And so we are. But when we speak of development, we speak of private capital — individuals with money they own or borrow on free market terms — planning a project and building it and owning it and operating it for a profit.

We do not mean individuals going to the government, getting the government to send the tax collector into New Yorkers’ homes, reach into their wallets, extract cash for which they worked hard, and give their cash to a private developer. And we also do not mean the government going to a lending institution, which ordinarily might lend a person money to start a business or build a home or send a child to college, and guaranteeing to use taxpayer money, if necessary, to pay back that lending institution so it will instead lend money to a project the government wants.

In the lexicon of these columns, that is not development. On the contrary, it is anti-development. Or, in some cases, simply a boon-doggle. The word boon-doggle was written about over the weekend by Glenn Altschuler, a professor at Cornell, in a book review in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette of a new book, by Nick Taylor, on FDR’s Works Progress Administration. It turns out that the word boon-doggle was used by, among others, the New York Sun of the day to mock government funded make-work schemes that, though they helped some individuals, delayed or retarded economic recovery.

What has put us in mind of all this is the disclosure in the New York Times last week that Mr. Solow is wanting to have a portion of his East River project occupied by the United Nations. We do not speak here about the worthiness of the United Nations. On that we have strong views. It would, in our view, be better for the people of New York — not to mention the rest of the world — if Mr. Solow’s hole in the ground were left to fill with stagnant water and mosquitoes than to be filled with the United Nations. But we do speak about the question of development — what it is and whether it’s beneficial.

If the United Nations moves in to even part of Mr. Solow’s development, who’s going to pay for it? Where is the U.N. going to get the money to pay Mr. Solow? Is it going to come from New York and other American taxpayers? Is Congress going to appropriate it to the U.N. or are banks going to lend it against a government guarantee, ensuring that ordinary businesses and home-owners will have a harder time borrowing money for their own ordinary purposes? Does the success of the Solow project depend on such market interference?

These are worthy questions for the City Council. Mayor Bloomberg likes to go around saying that the United Nations is a great economic boon to the city. Poppycock. If government interference and allocations didn’t force the United Nations on this city, the land that has been given to it would long since have been developed along commercial lines — homes, or hospitals, or educational institutions, or museums, or financial houses, or a manufacturing facility. Allocations as to what type of use to put the U.N. site to would have been made by developers using the most efficient mechanism yet devised for sorting out these allocations, a free market. The right move for the City Council is to clear the way for Mr. Solow’s development — but only on a transparent, free market basis.