Building houses and strip malls, grocery stores and banks is something we do in this country. It is a sign of good times, stability and economic growth. The only problem with is it has to end somewhere. We can’t just keep building forever, can we? You would think that eventually we would have enough places to live, enough places to shop and enough things to do.

Several years ago things were booming. Where you cold really see it was in the west. Places like Phoenix and Las Vegas were building subdivisions so fast it made your head hurt. And these subdivisions were huge. not the kind you’re use to if you are from the Midwest or east coast. These were ridiculously big. One subdivision running into another; creating a massive community.

In 2008, things started to change. They changed quick too. the economy started showing signs of instability. The first thing that started being affected was homes. Home sales started to plummet. People were not buying homes all of a sudden. Home builders had just gone from bragging about how they could build a home in record time, to having thousands of brand new, empty homes.

As things got even worse, more people became unemployed. The more people that became unemployed, the more people that couldn’t pay their mortgages. Folks started walking away from their homes. They made the decision that vacating the house was the only option – they simply could not afford to pay the bill anymore. Add on to that, the fact that because housing prices had dropped to all-time lows, they were never going to get their money back out of their house.

In this country, we have a tendency to be extremists. If something is big, new, popular or working for someone; we go full bore and run it straight into the ground. We do it with sports, we do it with music, with technology – and we do it with construction. Hopefully we will learn from this, and be more prepared when the economy takes a turn for the worst.