As we shall see in more detail in the next chapter, all this started changing during the Vietnam boom as developable coastal land – the raw material of the Southern California dream – began to disappear. Resulting land inflation, which went ballistic in the late 1970s and again in the late 1980s, profoundly reshaped the distribution of wealth and opportunity. Relative land scarcity also led to a rapid decline of ‘mom and pop’ builders, soon followed by the middle strata of developers. Control over land conversion has been increasingly centralized in huge companies capable of banking scarce remaining blocs of coastal plain, or financing whole new residential or industrial cities in distant interior basins.