White House releases plan to boost housing supply

This does not apply in central Europe.

Real estate market in Europe is severely constrained now. There is a demand overhang (for every property you've got hundreds of interested buyers) for family housing (I'm not monitoring situation in other markets) even in rural areas, at the same time all villages/cities are limiting new construction by zoning and/or building regulations.

My suspicion is that increasing the area of land intended for urban construction should decrease the house prices and increase their availability.

There is a tendency to limit expansion of villages/cities into surrounding areas for some decades now (in Europe, not sure about US). And that surrounding areas would be (mostly) agricultural land.

Many young people have trouble buying places to live in because the prices are too high - in some areas houses cost multiples than few decades ago (inflation adjusted).

Mega cities/high density housing are a solution for a crowded world without remote work/work from home, concentrating people into as small area as possible, not without its cons, of course.

Single family housing on the other hand (usually) offers higher quality of life, and is more desirable (for many, at least). And for that the solution may be creating new cities/suburban areas, therefore we would need to allocate more land, land not currently used for housing, of which we have plenty - although the current political/administrative notion is that we don't have where to expand, because agriculture land is sacred/not to be touched/built on.

P.S. I know the article is about US and I'm talking mostly about Europe. But European politicians have a tendency to copy down US policies in quick succession, so my comment may be relevant.

P.P.S. To say it clearly, I don't think that helping new homeowners to get into debt by providing down payment assistance (for housing units overpriced because of existing regulation) is better than lowering prices of said properties by changing zoning/building rules.

That's kind of a non-sequitor; downstream income has nothing to do with the cost of the good. Somebody could quadruple the price of steel, but people down the line will still make income.

Student loans is a great example here. Government comes in, gives everyone financing, and the price of college just so happens to rise to the level of financing the government will offer.

I don't see a way this ends well. If they offer it to everyone, housing prices simply factor that in. If they only offer it to the very poor, it just collapses two existing housing brackets into one (the very poor can spend like they're only kind of poor, making very poor cease to exist as a category and lumping the existing "very poor" housing into the "kind of poor" category).

We need more housing or lower demand. That's the solution. Anything else is just shuffling around hardships.

They also have the nasty side effect of doing far more than anyone intended.

Like that time they gave away subsidized loans for college and then acted surprised when the price of college increased.

If government puts me on their shit list I wind up in a cage.

If your local power company thinks still you owe them $50 after you move out of a rental you might get harassed by collectors and have your credit dinged. If your local government thinks you owe them $50 there's a good chance eventually wind up with a warrant out for your arrest. It gets even worse when you consider how often these kinds of entities make paper pushing errors.

The entity we entrust with the power to use violence shouldn't be sticking its fingers in anything where we aren't willing to accept more violence.