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Most CEOs are not nuns.

Sister Lillian Murphy has been chief executive of Mercy Housing for 23 years, so I did not know what to expect when I recently visited her office.

“The guy who was accused of threatening Nancy Pelosi lives in one of our buildings in San Francisco,” the longtime advocate of affordable housing told me. “There’s a picture of the cops out in front of the building arresting this guy. And I thought, ‘Oh, do we need this?’ “

Gregory Lee Giusti, 48 years old, is being held without bail after his arrest last month. He has pleaded not guilty to charges that he made at least four dozen menacing, profanity-laced calls to the speaker of the House, allegedly taking issue with her position on health care reform.

Wait a minute, Sister. This guy lives in your subsidized-housing project, and he’s reportedly all torqued about socialized health care?

“That’s a building that serves formerly homeless people,” Sister Lillian continued. “We have support services in the building. There are counselors there.”

Why can’t he rely on the free market like every other red-white- and-blue-bleeding American?

“The free market has worked for two-thirds of the country,” Sister Lillian said. “But there’s this one- third it doesn’t work for. . . . So what happens? Do we forget about them? Do we think about them as disposable?”

Maybe we should lock them in jail, I say, providing fully subsidized room and board for them there. That’s the expensive kind of societal solution that Denver- based Mercy Housing tries to avoid, Sister Lillian said.

The nonprofit has helped develop, preserve, operate or finance about 37,000 affordable-housing units in more than 200 cities in 41 states.

Mental illness, drug and alcohol abuse, homelessness, AIDS/HIV, broken homes, teen pregnancies, domestic violence — those are just some of the woes it tries to address. Most of Mercy Housing’s tenants are simply victims of the economy.

These days, Sister Lillian increasingly meets people who’ve been living in cars and garages, doubling up in tiny apartments, even turning to homeless shelters after losing their middle-class jobs.

The free market has simply not provided enough affordable housing for America’s growing ranks of low-income people.

OK, I interrupted again, but isn’t America’s ongoing foreclosure crisis going to fix this?

“It’s creating vacant housing,” Sister Lillian said. “That’s not necessarily affordable housing.”

One of the ways Mercy financed its projects was through selling tax credits. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were among its largest buyers. But after these troubled, government- sponsored mortgage makers stopped reporting profits, they no longer needed the tax credits.

No stranger to trouble

Giusti has done this sort of thing before. In denying bail, a judge cited two felony convictions and 13 misdemeanor convictions over the past 10 years.

In 2004, Giusti was reportedly arrested for threatening a train conductor who tried to collect his fare. Giusti then received a year in jail and three years of supervised probation.

And if he gets out again?

“We’ll take him back,” Sister Lillian said. “We don’t want him getting out of jail and going back on the streets.”

Help him? But wouldn’t that be the very kind of socialized health care he’s reportedly so upset about in the first place?

And aren’t you a nun? Couldn’t you just whack his knuckles with a ruler?

Al Lewis: 212-416-2617, al.lewis@dowjones.com or