Kamala Harris can’t count on adding 3 million houses to the market by 2028.

The worst parts of Vice President Kamala Harris’s economic plan are pretty bad. Like, so bad that her more credible defenders are reduced to arguing that silly proposals such as exempting tips from income tax at least poll well, and maybe when she says “first-ever federal ban on price-gouging on food,” she really just means “robust antitrust enforcement.”

In any case, supporters say, her best ideas are very good, especially her housing agenda. America’s housing crisis makes everything else about the U.S. economy worse: It exacerbates homelessness, slows family formation, prevents workers from moving to opportunity and puts an enormous strain on the budgets of hardworking people. Harris’s promise to build 3 million homes by the end of her first term is a signal that she understands what it takes to fix the problem and is serious about doing so.

It’s certainly true that America’s housing problems can’t be fixed without new supply. Unfortunately, it’s unlikely that 3 million homes, or anything close to that number, could be added in the next four years. Meanwhile, the other, not as good, parts of her housing agenda will be both easier to achieve and, absent the new housing supply, counterproductive.

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Harris’s housing plan has three main planks. One of these is $25,000 in down payment assistance for first-time home buyers, which she says will help more than 4 million home buyers over four years. Another is a plan to punish corporate landlords who buy up lots of single-family rental properties or use algorithmic software to set prices.

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The third plank is the 3 million new homes, which Harris promises to get built with a combination of initiatives: a $40 billion “innovation fund”; “a historic expansion of the existing tax incentive for businesses that build rental housing that is affordable”; a new tax credit for building starter homes; and a red-tape initiative that is meant to streamline permitting processes for builders.

Without the millions of new houses, the two other initiatives risk making the housing situation worse. Restrictions on corporate landlords could shrink supply by undermining the build-to-rent market, which is currently one of the strongest sectors in new construction, according to developer Bobby Fijan. And that down payment assistance for first-time home buyers would likely end up in the pockets of existing homeowners, as newbies use it to bid up prices in a tight market.

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It’s not impossible to construct 750,000 extra homes a year — housing starts, which were about 1.2 million last year, hit 2.2 million at the peak of the housing bubble. But ramping up production to that level would take years, and might never happen,........

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