For stumping political candidates, vowing to build affordable housing remains one of their biggest rallying cries.

Presidential candidate Kamala Harris promised three million new housing units over four years, along with tax incentives and $25,000 down payment assistance for first-time buyers. Harris also proposed a whopping $40 billion innovation fund that would empower local governments to fund and support community solutions for housing construction.

When she made her campaign promise, Harris had been hearing about affordable housing from her Democratic peers for more than 20 years. In 2002, then-California Governor Gray Davis signed a package of bills designed to address the state’s housing crisis. Davis promised that the package would provide “new, affordable housing being built all across the state. More families will have the American dream of home ownership within their grasp.”

Two decades later, Governor Gavin Newsom signed a 56-bill package that he said would “incentivize and reduce barriers to housing and support the development of more affordable homes.” As of April, Newsom’s vision for the California home market remained deeply flawed, with a median sale price of $910,000 for houses on that date.

Governors Janet Mills of Maine, J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, and Maura Healey of Massachusetts have all bemoaned home shortages and signed multi-million-dollar bills they hope will solve the problem of high housing demand and limited supply. Healey signed the Affordable Homes Act, which authorized $5.2 billion to be spent on housing over the next five years and established 50 policy initiatives to counter rising prices.

Fifty policy initiatives may be overkill — too many cooks spoil the broth. As Edward Pinto, senior fellow and co-director of the American Enterprise Institute’s Housing Center, noted, it’s “much, much harder” for the government to pass “supply-side proposals” compared with efforts that generate demand by making home-buying easier for consumers. Pinto concluded that Harris’s plan was worse than doing nothing.

Then-candidate and former President Donald Trump also discussed ways to increase housing supply as part of his presidential campaign proposals. “We’re going to open up tracts of federal land for housing construction,” Trump said in an August 15 press conference. “We desperately need housing for people who can’t afford what’s going on now.”

Since President Trump’s election, Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner and Department of the Interior Secretary Doug Burgum announced plans to identify federal lands where affordable housing could be built. Turner and Burgum will launch the Joint Task Force on Federal Land for Housing to find underutilized lands for residential development and to streamline the process of transferring lands for housing use.

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, they promoted the plans as a way to increase housing supply and lower costs for Americans. They wrote:

“Working together, our agencies can take inventory of underused federal properties, transfer or lease them to states or localities to address housing needs, and support the infrastructure required to make development viable — all while ensuring affordability remains at the core of the mission.”

The Interior Department oversees more than 500 million acres of federal land, and the department contends that much of it is suitable for residential use. However, implementation would likely take decades, if it happens at all. Most of the developable land is in western states like California, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, Wyoming, Oregon, Idaho, and Colorado, said Bureau of Land Management Director Jon Raby. The lands vary widely, ranging from deserts and grasslands to mountains and forests.

Most of the federal government’s land — whether west or east — lacks the required water and sewage infrastructure to support new communities. Environmental groups are concerned that development will adversely affect wildlife habitat. As Raby noted, “People love their public lands. Every acre is important to somebody.”

Nowhere in HUD or DOI’s planning is a commitment to scrutinize sustainability. The constant factor in affordable housing is population growth. With more than one million legal immigrants admitted annually and chain migration — which allows each immigrant to petition for an average of three non-nuclear family members who can eventually petition their own families — housing developments, even those built in remote areas, will eventually be overwhelmed.

Reducing the number of people competing for existing affordable housing would automatically create more of this elusive commodity.

Joe Guzzardi is an Institute for Sound Public Policy analyst who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at jguzzardi@pfirdc.org.