by Elizabeth Wordsmith

Created on: May 07, 2008

The mortgage foreclosure crisis is a complex problem involving many factors and affected by other current economic factors. This is a downwardly spiraling problem that will have to play itself out.

Too many people greedily jumped aboard the real estate boom and invested unwisely and incautiously. Prompted by fear of rising home values, emotional desires of attaining the American dream, falsely thinking that the rising prices would give them equity in their homes and offset any changes in the interest rates, not being armed with enough knowledge, and not being able to foresee other changes in the economy like skyrocketing gas prices, runaway inflation, and job losses, buyers forged ahead with almost blind faith in the market and got what they could while the getting was good.

When politicians talk about infrastructure, they should also talk about people infrastructure. When communities become too expensive for working class people, that spells trouble. When the majority of the population is living on beer budget wages, but the housing has champagne price tags, people are forced to move to less expensive areas.

Take, for instance, South Florida. The first clue of big trouble came to light after our summer of non stop hurricanes. Insurance companies lost massive amounts of money that summer and raised their hurricane insurance premiums to unaffordable prices in the aftermath. In the state of Florida, banks require homeowners with mortgages to carry this insurance. But what does a homeowner do when they haven't anticipated this shocking and substantial dent in their budget?

Gas prices rose that summer, too. Then they declined a bit, but for just a short time. When gas prices started to climb again, they just kept on climbing.

Businesses have felt the crunch too and have been letting employees go or giving no raises or only the minimum.

Wages are not keeping up with inflation. Thus, homeowners feeling this stress put their homes on the market and the market gets flooded. Because the real estate market is partially driven by supply and demand, home values started to fall, compounding economic problems.

When news started surfacing about home foreclosures and huge increases in ARM mortgages, many shady lending practices came to light. Were the buyers warned that their interests rates could climb? Perhaps. But, in Florida at least, I hardly believe that anyone could have foreseen the economic impact of one hurricane season. Many buyers may have put those risks to the

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