Vice President Kamala Harris is not wrong to emphasize that the best solution to our housing shortage is the construction of new homes. She’s actually enunciated something close to a program to do so: tax credits for small “starter” homes, as part of a push for 3 million new houses. It’s encouraging that the Democratic presidential candidate shows a basic knowledge of the law of supply and demand: more housing might mean lower prices.

As a result, Harris has been full-on embraced by the so-called “Yes In My Backyard” movement. “Kamala Harris is a YIMBY,” YIMBYs for Harris co-founder Armand Domalewski told HuffPost.

But the Harris promise of federal aid to pry open the doors of Not In My Backyard towns brings with it peril, as well as promise. The risk is that of Washington starting to call the shots on all sorts of local planning and zoning decisions that have historically been left up to a town’s own citizens.

In the background of the lure of federal housing assistance is the leverage of federal funding, whether for “community development,” transportation, or even sewage systems — grants for all of which Washington disburses. These grants can be used as sticks: Change your zoning, or lose federal funding.

But with that approach comes the risk that other social goals will be layered on top of zoning relaxation. We’ve seen exactly this scenario previously when the Obama administration undertook what it called the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing program and tied it to the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Community Development Block Grant Program funding.

After a hiatus under former President Donald Trump, the Biden administration has picked up the approach. It’s not fair housing — not discriminating on the basis of race when renting or selling housing — as common sense would dictate. Rather, it has, per HUD under Democrats, veered toward remaking communities broadly — not only encouraging acceptance of “affordable,” or subsidized, housing but pressuring communities in all sorts of other ways.

If she continues the Obama-Biden approach, Harris’s housing goals could include anything from making sure new housing is near a supermarket, and not in a “food desert,” to building a new library in what progressives like to call “under-resourced” neighborhoods.

Consider how HUD has already defined equity in housing policy: as “access to high quality schools, equitable employment opportunities, reliable transportation services, parks and recreation facilities, community centers, community-based supportive services, law enforcement and emergency services, healthcare services, grocery stores, retail establishments, infrastructure and municipal services, libraries, and banking and financial institutions.”

The original HUD goal, making poorer neighborhoods good neighborhoods, has been forgotten in favor of relocating the poor to “high-opportunity neighborhoods.” Harris needs to be asked whether she would condition federal tax credits or down payment assistance on Washington-knows-best intrusion.

The means for Washington to exert pressure are there. More than 1,200 jurisdictions with low-income areas, for instance, receive “community development block grants” to support everything from new sidewalks to social service groups through HUD.

And HUD has already shown a willingness to force localities receiving such funds to accept subsidized housing — as in Westchester County, New York, where a federal court monitor forced the construction of subsidized housing despite opposition in places including Chappaqua, where Hillary Clinton lives.

Today, housing policy is the province of more than 19,000 local jurisdictions. Through federal leverage, they can be subject to pressure to reform their zoning and change the character of their towns.

The sheer localism of housing policy, dominated by costly, large-lot, single-family zoning in so much of the country, rightly frustrates YIMBYites. It leads to the temptation to deploy the federal government to force local zoning change.

Indeed, far-sighted communities should permit a wide range of lower-cost housing to be built — as I argue in my book The Poor Side of Town: And Why We Need It. Even such simple moves as changing 2-acre zoning to 1- or 1/2-acre zoning is a way to let housing be built for local teachers and EMTs, as well as kids who grew up in town and want to stay.

There is simply no getting around the fact that increasing the housing supply will have to involve a change in standards, tastes, and preferences at the local level and that those who seek to build it must marshal good arguments to persuade local officials. That should mean opening the doors for new, “missing middle” starter homes. It would mean not pushing for “low-income” housing that conjures public housing high-rises but, rather, what Edward Pinto and Tobias Peters, my colleagues at the American Enterprise Institute, call “light-touch density” — squeezing in two-family houses in underutilized parts of town centers, for instance.

HUD, for its part, could well advocate for that or similar policies — without resorting to the use of a big stick.

But increasing our housing supply shouldn’t mean a Washington takeover of local government.