R. Horton's stock went from $3 in early 1997 to all-time high of $42.82 on July 20, 2005. Pulte Corp's revenues grew from $2.33 billion in 1996 to $14.69 billion in 2005. Mortgage equity withdrawals – primarily home equity loans and cash out refinancings – grew considerably since the early 1990s. According to US Federal Reserve estimates, in 2005 homeowners extracted $750 billion of equity from their homes (up from $106 billion in 1996), spending two thirds of it on personal consumption, home improvements, and credit card debt. It is widely believed that the increased degree of economic activity produced by the expanding housing bubble in 2001–2003 was partly responsible for averting a full-scale recession in the U.S. economy following the dot-com bust and offshoring to China. Analysts believed that with the downturn in the two sectors, the economy from the early 2000s to 2007 evaded what would have been stagnant growth with a booming housing market creating jobs, economic demand along with a consumer boom that came from home value withdraws until the housing market began a correction. Rapidly growing house prices and increasing price gradients forced many residents to flee the expensive centers of many metropolitan areas, resulting in the explosive growth of exurbs in some regions. The population of Riverside County, California almost doubled from 1,170,413 in 1990 to 2,026,803 in 2006, due to its relative proximity to San Diego and Los Angeles. On the East Coast, Loudoun County, Virginia, near Washington, D.C., saw its population triple between 1990 and 2006. Extreme regional differences in land prices. The differences in housing prices are mainly due to differences in land values, which reached 85% of the total value of houses in the highest priced markets at the peak. The Wisconsin Business School publishes an on line database with building cost and land values for 46 U.S. metro areas. One of the fastest-growing regions in the United States for the last several decades was the Atlanta, Georgia metro area, where land values are a small fraction of those in the high-priced markets. High land values contribute to high living costs in general and are part of the reason for the decline of the old industrial centers while new automobile plants, for example, were built throughout the South, which grew in population faster than the other regions. People who either experienced foreclosures or live near foreclosures have a higher probability