Hoyt reconstructed Chicago land values from 1830 to 1933 and found not steady growth but a succession of speculative cycles roughly fifteen to twenty years long, each repeating the same sequence: in-migration, rising rents, a subdivision and building boom carried on credit, over-platting far beyond any plausible demand, collapse, foreclosure, and years of empty paper subdivisions. He documented the canal mania of the 1830s, the busts of the 1870s and 1890s, and the 1920s boom whose wreckage he was writing in. Land, in his account, is the asset around which the credit cycle turns, and much of the plan is written by the boom rather than by the planner.
It put speculation and the real-estate cycle at the centre of how cities actually get built - and mis-built, in over-subdivided fringes that stand empty for decades. The pattern Hoyt described is the template for reading Japan's 1980s land bubble, the 2008 subprime crash, and the unfinished peripheries of Spain, Ireland and China.
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