Our lot : how real estate came to own us /

How the homes we live in turned into the monsters that ate our economy and how the United States became a nation obsessed with real estate.

Our Lot tells how an entire nation got swept up in real estate mania, and it casts the business story--the collapse of the mortgage markets and its global impact on the economy--as the product of a decades-long project of social engineering by the U .S. government to make homeownership possible for those who had never been able to attain it before. Based on original reporting, Our Lot looks at the boom as experienced by ordinary Americans, and examines how our own economic anxieties and realities, combined with greed and delusion on Wall S treet and in Washington, inflated the real estate bubble. In accessible language, the book helps homeowners and would-be homeowners understand what really happened, how it has affected our homes and communities, and how we can move on to a future we'll want to live in.