The organization on whose watch occurred Rwanda, Darfur, Srebrenica, and the oil-for-food scandal has decided that it can help solve New York City’s affordable housing shortage.

At the dedication of a recently renovated five-story apartment building in Harlem yesterday, several United Nations delegates and members of the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (known as U.N. Habitat) teamed up with Habitat for Humanity-NYC, representatives from the Earth Institute at Columbia University, and the Rockefeller Foundation to promote housing solutions from “New York to New Orleans to New Delhi.”

The event was aimed at linking the urban poverty problems in New York City to those recently highlighted in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina as well as those facing other cities around the world.

“Tens of thousands of New York City families live in overcrowded, unsafe or unhealthy homes,” a statement from Habitat for Humanity-NYC said, “while one in three urban dwellers around the world live in dire conditions: unsafe and insecure housing, poor or no access to clean drinking water, cramped and overcrowded spaces and non-existent sanitary facilities.”

The director of Columbia University’s Center for Sustainable Urban Development, Elliott Sclar, who produced a report for the United Nations on alleviating urban poverty, told The New York Sun that affordable housing was becoming a severe problem in New York, Rome, Madrid, and around the world.

Mr. Sclar said that New York is a relative “paradise” compared to cities like Nairobi or New Delhi, but that “affordable housing problems here are getting more severe.”

A director of the Manhattan Institute, a New York-based think tank, Howard Husock, said that the comparison between housing problems in America and abroad was far-fetched.

“There is zero poverty by international standards in the United States,” Mr. Husock said. “To think it is at all comparable to Bangladesh is completely ridiculous.”

Mr. Husock also said that Habitat for Humanity’s model of building low-cost housing that residents can afford to buy is preferable to other forms of housing subsidies.

A state senator who is a critic of the United Nations, Martin Golden, told the Sun, “It’s a stretch to think we are going to compare people in New York City to New Delhi and New Orleans.”

Mr. Golden said the United Nations should “stick to what it does best,” relieving poverty in other nations.

A director of U.N. Habitat, Axumite Gebre-Egziabher, told the Sun that while the organization is mostly active in the developing world, “we hope to contribute more” to America.

Mr. Sclar yesterday called for the application of the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals in New York City. The MDGs are a set of eight targets agreed on by many world leaders to alleviate poverty, hunger, disease, illiteracy, environmental degradation, and discrimination against women by 2015.

In parts of the developing world, Mr. Sclar said, “one out of five children won’t make it to age 5. There are places in this city where there are five people to a room, seven people to two rooms.”

Mr. Sclar said urban problems worldwide are becoming more interconnected.

“It’s a global economy now,” he told the Sun.

Mr. Sclar’s report on alleviating urban poverty for the Millennium Project, a project run by Columbia’s Earth Institute and commissioned by the United Nations, calls for “improving security of tenure for slum dwellers, upgrading slums and improving housing, expanding citywide infrastructure and effective service delivery, creating urban jobs though local economic development, and providing alternatives to slum formation.”

Yesterday’s event was held in observance of World Habitat Day.