Only $400,000 for Santa Monica?

"The Southern California residential real estate boom began in about 1974. It was not just a boom. It was a superboom, with miserable bungalows in Santa Monica running up from $40,000 in 1974 to $400,000 by 1980...Every day, home buyers would look at the prices and say, 'It can't go on.' But every day, for five years, it did go on. Middle-class families were priced out of the market, and the brokers said, 'But the rich will always be able to buy.'...But even when inflation stopped, brokers said, 'The prices have nothing to do with inflation. Everyone on earth wants to live in L.A.'..Then the music stopped, some afternoon in 1980. As if a spell had fallen over the city, suddenly things began to stay on the market for three months, six months, a year, two years. Buyers disappeared..The great Southern California real estate boom was over." [New York Times, December 8, 1984]