"The inland cities, with more land available to allow expansion, experienced the most overbuilding, the most aggressive lenders, the highest levels of speculators looking to get rich quick by flipping houses, and so perhaps it’s not that surprising that when the housing market turned south, they also experienced the highest default rates."
This is a pretty strong theory: more land ==> all these things, including overbuilding. What is "overbuilding" even supposed to mean? "Over" relative to what?
These studies indicate that the problem is slow permitting and high regulation in places that do have lots of land:
http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2014/02/27/why-las-vegas-got-...
Texas and Atlanta have lots of land around them, but they did not have nearly the default problem of vegas and florida and california because they built a lot very quickly, so prices never rose dramatically.
In short, there was not overbuilding. There was underbuilding, and building that happened too late.
This is a pretty strong theory: more land ==> all these things, including overbuilding. What is "overbuilding" even supposed to mean? "Over" relative to what?
These studies indicate that the problem is slow permitting and high regulation in places that do have lots of land: http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2014/02/27/why-las-vegas-got-...
Texas and Atlanta have lots of land around them, but they did not have nearly the default problem of vegas and florida and california because they built a lot very quickly, so prices never rose dramatically.
In short, there was not overbuilding. There was underbuilding, and building that happened too late.