The 1920s American Real Estate Boom and the Downturn of the Great Depression Evidence from City Cross- Sections

Prior to the early twenty- Wrst century there were several regional real estate booms in American history, but the only one that appears to have spread across most of the country occurred in the mid- 1920s. In popular memory and some academic accounts (e.g., Shiller 2005), the real estate boom of the 1920s was concentrated in Florida. But as Frederick Lewis Allen (1931) observed in Only Yesterday, his history of the decade: [E]specially during its middle years, there was a boom in suburban lands outside virtually every American city... the automobile played its part... by bringing within easy range of the suburban railroad station, and thus of the big city, great stretches of woodland and Weld which a few years before had seemed remote and inaccessible. Attractive suburbs grew with amazing speed... The old Jackson farm with its orchards and daisy- Welds was staked out in lots and attacked by the steam- shovel and became Jacobean Heights or Colonial Terrace or Alhambra Gardens, with paved roads, twentieth- century comforts, Old World charm, an