In addition to having an incredible mountain just 12 miles away, the town of Jackson is also a really cool place in its own right. It’s a cowboy town with endless wilderness all around it. But since it’s such a big tourist destination, the town is filled with great restaurants, art galleries, and the obligatory real estate brokerages trying to sell vacation properties.

Here’s what the town looks like from the top of Snow King (the in-town ski mountain). Photo credit: David Stubbs for the New York Times.

But from a land use standpoint, I also find the town really interesting because of its network of fine grain alleys. Here’s a picture of Gaslight Alley. For those of you who are regular readers of this blog, you’re probably aware that I’m a big supporter of laneway housing in Toronto. I think it’s a hidden opportunity. It could be another—more intimate—layer to the city.

Today, building a laneway house is virtually a non-starter with the City of Toronto. Whether it’s issues of utilities or the fact that laneways don’t easily accommodate service vehicles (maybe we need smaller service vehicles), the city has a litany of reasons for why they just won’t work.

But I’m absolutely certain that we could figure out solutions to all of the obstacles if we really put our minds to it. It’s not a question of not being able to do it, it’s a question of not wanting to do it.

If you had to pick an epicentre for the housing bust of 2008, I’d say that Las Vegas would be a pretty safe bet.

Las Vegas home prices doubled between 2002 and 2006 (the peak), and then fell 62% through to 2012! According to RealtyTrac, Las Vegas saw the highest rate of foreclosure (in 2009) compared to any other major city in the US. 1 out of every 13 properties was in foreclosure. That’s pretty incredible.

Now, hindsight is always 20/20, but from the beginning I had a hard time understanding Las Vegas from a real estate standpoint. You have a city that’s running out of water and who’s major economic drivers are tourism, gambling and conventions. Not only are these industries highly cyclical, but they don’t create a lot of high paying local jobs.

So for home prices to double in the span of 4 years, it must mean that there’s a lot of investor activity in the market. But how much is a lot? As one example, the 678 unit Meridian Private Residences, which was a condo conversion done by American Invsco, apparently only sold 14 units to end users. The remaining 98% of the units were bought by investors.

Those are pretty scary numbers - both for investors and end users. And while times today are certainly nowhere near as frothy, I still don’t get Las Vegas real estate.