Today's mortgage crisis has been blamed on lenders, and it has been blamed in "irresponsible borrowers, who bought houses they couldn't afford." While mortgage lenders and home-buyers have all had a hand in creating the existing crisis, placing the blame on either or both overlooks a deeper problem that, upon first glance at the bigger picture, can remain obscured.

I, personally, would not have been comfortable with an adjustable rate mortgage; and I'm not saying the people who signed on for them are entirely blameless for doing so. Still, young families are faced with living where houses are less expensive and jobs are low paying or hard to find; or else living where the jobs are and where the homes cost more. Where I live (Massachusetts) it would be a very rare house that sold for under $300,000. Rents for decent two-bedroom apartments are, on average, in the area of at $1700 a month. There are people today who are earning a rate of pay that I earned back in the 1970's. Of course, that pay today would be the low end (when it wasn't back then), but a "high-average-end" house back then sold for, perhaps, $85,000 (4 bedroom with two and a half baths, an acre of land, a full attic, a family room). There is no "low-end" house today for $85,000 (to go along with how pays have gone up but not gone up at the same rates that home prices have).

So, today's young families are faced with deciding to have no children (possibly ever - and everyone has a right to a have a family, particularly the hard-working thirty-somethings who got an education and waited to have children), and not need that three-bedroom home (or apartment for however much that would cost them); or try to do the "sensible thing" of at least putting their monthly housing money into equity. Yes, they took a gamble; but in fairness to them, many felt they didn't have a choice (unless, again, they wanted to forego having a family - but that's a little too much to expect of people in their thirties). For people a little older, children may have outgrown the little apartment or small home they had. A whole lot of people felt pressured to buy a home before the prices went up yet farther beyond reach.

Giving a couple of thousand dollars a month away in rent money meant people weren't doing what would make the best use of their money. Twenty-five years ago a $72,000 home would jump up in price about $20,000 in one year. About five years ago, a young couple I know, who had bought a home,

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