So much for all that Agenda 21 paranoia.

Yesterday the White House released something they called a Housing Development Toolkit. It took aim at many of the worst practices of local government, from a resistance to incremental development to mandatory parking minimums. It provided an outline for local governments looking to "modernize" their land use regulations. As a feign at bully pulpit rhetoric for policy geeks, it was a fun read.

The toolkit listed the benefits of "modernizing" — I keep putting that word in quotes because I find it strange yet it is the word they used — and, while many advocates are focusing on a transportation recommendation for more transit use, I actually found the report's first observation to be more interesting and relevant:

Housing regulation that allows supply to respond elastically to demand helps cities protect homeowners and home values while maintaining housing affordability.

"Allowing supply to respond elastically to demand....." That's a really painful way to describe what is commonly thought of as a market. Yes, when the market is able to respond to a lack of supply and an increase of demand by building more housing, it helps bring supply and demand into balance at lower prices. Zoning regulations, especially those that seek to preserve neighborhoods under glass once they are established, distort the feedback mechanism of the housing market. I'm in.

What's odd is their inclusion of "protect homeowners and home values" in that thought. I would agree that having freer markets for housing construction would bring prices down in many parts of the country. However, I don't think it's clear that we can do that and simultaneously maintain the inflated home values we are trying to artificially sustain. In fact, re-inflating the housing bubble has been the policy goal of the current administration as well as the Federal Reserve, leading to a string of policies that benefit current homeowners and debtors at the expense of prospective buyers and savers.

Of course, it could be that the Obama administration has some covert Austrian economists who are seeking to protect homeowners from government-induced housing bubbles, but I doubt it. It's more likely that this is an attempt at a politically-happy spin on the difficult policy paradox of local zoning: Our debt economy needs inflated housing prices, yet inflated housing prices have terrible economic consequences over the long term. It might be too much to hope that they would bite that one off.

Still, the document has a lot of things straight out of the Strong Towns playbook (it actually reminded me of Andrew Burleson's article "10 Steps to Fix a City"). The first five recommendations in the Housing Development Toolkit are absolute no-brainers; if you're not doing these things already, your city is falling behind. Here they are, with some related stuff we've written along the way.

1. Establishing by-right development

2. Taxing vacant land or donating it to non-profit developers