Depending on who you ask, the U.S. falls short of housing demand by as many as 5.5 million homes. And, while there are myriad ideas out there to address that shortage, one proposal floated by both parties during campaign season that would potentially dodge quite a few of the typical obstacles to building new housing: opening up federally controlled public lands for housing construction.

Mike Albertus is a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and author of, “Land Power: Who Has It, Who Doesn’t, and How That Determines the Fate of Societies.” He joined “Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal to talk about what building homes on federal land would look like in practice. An edited transcript of their conversation is below.

Kai Ryssdal: Give me a sense of scale, would you? How much land does the federal government own? Do you know?

Mike Albertus: The federal government owns a lot of land, tens of millions of acres of land, and in the American West in particular, it owns even a greater share of all land. It owns a bit over 50% of land in the West, and that’s spread across the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service, Fish and Wildlife and the like.

Ryssdal: The catch, of course, is that when you drive from like, LA to, I don’t know, Vegas or Denver or someplace, that’s not what we’re talking about, right? You don’t want to build in the wild expanses. We need land where people want to live.

Albertus: Of course, yeah, a proposal or an idea to use federal land for building housing should focus really on metropolitan areas, both within city boundaries as well as at the outskirts where new building is happening and where cities are expanding.

Ryssdal: Give me a for instance. What does that look like?

Albertus: So one example would come from Las Vegas. Just at the end of last year, the Bureau of Land Management sold a small piece of land, 20 acres of land, at a nominal price to Clark County in Las Vegas for the purposes of building single-family homes for low-income households. And the county now is going to maintain the land and sell the homes to prospective buyers. So that’s the most recent transaction. A long line of federal land sales in the county stem from the 1998 Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act. But there are many other examples as well, and there are many growing metropolitan areas that are constrained by federal lands at the outskirts.

Ryssdal: There are those who will listen to this interview, professor, who will point out rightly that part of the reason that these lands have not been developed yet is that they are set aside specifically for protection, either just for the natural resource or for recreation or what have you. And that sound you hear is all those people screaming at the radio saying, “What do you mean you’re going to build housing on that land?”

Albertus: Of course. This is not a proposal to bulldoze Yellowstone or build condos along the rim of the Grand Canyon or something like that. I think everyone is on the same page that a considerable portion of federal land is intended for conservation, preservation. There’s also, of course, a set of public lands that are used for things like grazing or for natural resource management. But we’re talking about maybe 0.1% of federal land that tends to be, again, at the outskirts or within metropolitan areas.

Ryssdal: It was interesting to me, as I read up for this interview, that this is broadly supported on a bipartisan basis. Both President Trump and then-Vice President Harris supported it during the campaign. Does anything else have to happen before land sales could conceivably start? Even small ones like the one you talked about?

Albertus: That’s right. There are very few things it seems like, at the face of it, that Americans will agree on across the aisle, but, actually, this is one area where there does appear to be convergence between Democrats and Republicans. One thing I would say is that there needs to be stipulations, not only for the federal lands that are used for this sort of a proposal, but also how building would actually be done in terms of density requirements and affordable housing and the like. And so, there I think we’ll see a little bit of a bigger divergence, but there is the capacity for the federal government to do this on a selective basis already.

Ryssdal: We should emphasize here, we’re playing the long game. None of this is happening tomorrow, right?

Albertus: That’s exactly right. The housing crisis has been brewing since the Great Recession, and building has really never caught up with demand, and, as a result, there’s a lot of pent up demand. And this sort of, you know, use of federal land is not going to solve the housing crisis overnight. It’s going to take some time for this sort of thing to bite.