Marginal Land
Categories: Real Estate
It took 400 tons of dig to produce a carload of paydirt, which netted 5 ounces of gold. The land is only marginally good enough to be worthy of being gold-mined. Miners just barely pay for the tractors and fuel and water use and permits and labor and risk to be worth their time to mine. Same is true with land on the outskirts of town for home developers. It's only marginal until it's good.
Weird fact: in the '50s, a popular form of movie-going was the Drive-In Theater. You'd drive your car to a parking lot on the far outskirts of town, where you'd hook a speaker to your car window and watch movies from your car. The land was cheap because it was...away. And it was dark...few city lights reached there. But then we as a nation grew, and what used to be marginal land became incredibly valuable land.
The most extreme example:
The land on which today sits the GooglePlex, arguably the most expensive real estate in the country, or at least most valued, used to be a drive-in movie theater, because in the '50s, '60s and '70s, that was, yes...marginal land.