Morgan Housel

There's no homes.

I can't even rent a house.

I came home.

I fought for my country and served in Europe and fought in the war.

And I came home and I'm living in my mom's basement.

Right.

And the indignity of that, huge issue.

And we solved the issue very quickly.

So late 1940s to early 1950s, we built millions and millions of homes.

That was by and large what it was.

And so, for example-

It can get more complicated than that, but I'll give you the well-known example.

In the late 1940s, the Levitt brothers were home builders and they saw this unprecedented demand from GIs coming home.

And they said, this is the opportunity.

We can make a fortune by going out and buying a bunch of abandoned farmland in Pennsylvania and New York and building tens of thousands of small cheap homes.

And that's what became Levittown.

And they were able to do that and just throw them up very quickly.

And they had a lot of economies of scale.

They figured out how to build cheap homes that people still liked and that a GI and his family and his three kids can move into and have a dignified life.

And they did it very quickly.