For building wealth and making some cash flow, I'll stay wioth real estate. I'm a buy and hold guy and southern California is the place to own. Population projections driving demand.
You can't go on population figures alone. Like I said in a previous post, Japan has one of the highest population densities in the world. They have literally nowhere to build but up. And yet...
"When the (real estate) bubble burst, property prices plummeted more than 80%... wiping out many families' wealth and helping plunge the economy into 13 years of stagnation." ~ Financial Times, March 24, 2005, referring to Japan in the late 1980s.
http://www.investmentu.com/IUEL/2005/20050328.html