I remember forty years ago, seven years into my engineering career, we are about to be able to afford our first house. Land across the Texas hill country had fallen to $400 an acre. ( Condos at Port Aransas, with the developers/operator/managements financially broke, were selling for forty grand.) Interest rates at 13% (my mother was getting 13% on tax exempt bonds!). Cash was king, but we had only the savings for a down payment for a house. Twenty years later I'm listening to this fella at the bar explaining how he just bought forty acres for $4,000 each. My lesson growing up: in the fifties, just about everyone we knew was buying land on the outer loop, a one lane road then, but "it will become priceless commercial property very soon." Thing is, that didn't happen until the nineties.
