While it may not exactly answer the question, I work for a public policy research center based in New York City and we get annual property level tax data from the city's Department of Finance. It comes on a cartridge in variable length ebcdic and we have to take the disk to the one remaining mainframe at NYU in order to get them to drop it on an ft server so that we can work with it.

Yes. I believe you are.

Well I am an economist actually and while I don't think that anybody is saying that this sort of spending caused the bubble, they are symptomatic of the sort of investing that happens in a bubble. Of course, with the economy going the way it is, all this is pretty much moot since there is clearly not a lot of speculative investment going on.