Matt Yglesias is  still trying to figure out the late housing bubble. His latest approach is to separate structures and land, which leads him to this conclusion: I think it makes more sense to restrict the idea of a “bubble” to speculative asset like land (or stocks or gold or whatever) rather than to the actual building. A building boom may be (indeed probably is) in some sense “unsustainable” but when the boom collapses it’s not like an asset price bubble that leaves nothing in its wake but debt. A boom in structure… Read More