Morgan Housel

Do you know what Levittown is?

There's several of them.

And it was at the end of World War II.

We stopped building houses in World War II because we needed the material for other things.

We didn't build a single house, basically.

And then you had 16 million GIs come home.

all of whom what they wanted more than anything else was a house.

And so they came home in the late 1940s, and there was a massive housing shortage, and prices surged, and it was a huge problem.

But back then, in most areas of the country, there was very little zoning.

And so the Levitt brothers started buying up old abandoned farms, and they built tens of thousands of houses, just threw them up.

And this became like the quintessential white picket fence, small, that housed all the GIs.

And one of the parts of the bill of the book that's really interesting is, like I said, there's virtually no zoning back then.

If you if you bought a farm, do whatever the hell you want with it.

Now, we're sitting here in Austin, Texas.

Texas is one of the few states that still more or less has that.

And what is true about Texas housing?

It's cheap relative to other areas of the country.

And if you go to San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, extremely difficult zoning and an entry level shithouse costs two and a half million dollars.

And it's absolutely devastating to the young generation who rightly feels that the opportunities that were afforded to their parents and their grandparents don't exist anymore.

Probably Derek Thompson.