Bob "No Relation" Perry. Passed away not long ago. Ah... OK.
When I was in San Antonio in 1984-88, the Ray Ellison Co., an unscrupulous homebuilder, used illegal help to slap up cheap (and I mean REALLY cheap, low quality) homes, then offered some wildly "creative" financing, i.e., graduated payment ARMs starting at 6% in an era when the going 30-year fixed rate was around 13.5%. Ray Ellison "developed" neighborhood after neighborhood, and when ready to move to the next spot of empty real estate, sold off the remaining unsold inventory to Epic Realty, who then dumped them onto the Section 8 rental market. All those ingredients totalled up for gross failure of the housing market in the mid-1980s for that area... It was a friggin' mess.
When I was in San Antonio in 1984-88, the Ray Ellison Co., an unscrupulous homebuilder, used illegal help to slap up cheap (and I mean REALLY cheap, low quality) homes, then offered some wildly "creative" financing, i.e., graduated payment ARMs starting at 6% in an era when the going 30-year fixed rate was around 13.5%. Ray Ellison "developed" neighborhood after neighborhood, and when ready to move to the next spot of empty real estate, sold off the remaining unsold inventory to Epic Realty, who then dumped them onto the Section 8 rental market. All those ingredients totalled up for gross failure of the housing market in the mid-1980s for that area... It was a friggin' mess.
Bob Perry and
Charles Butt (grocer) were the two largest/richest donors to Republicans and Democrats in Texas, both legislature and state offices, for quite a while, and together they worked to kill off legislation that was seen as anti-illegal immigrant. Very disconcerting how much influence they had over the Governor and the legislature, but money talks and all that.