One guy who signed on for a mortgage he could not handle was a New York Times economics writer. His new book is called BUSTED.
Alyssa Katz has published, Our Lot: How Real Estate Has Come To Own Us.
Katz places most of the blame on the government for giving perverse incentives that encourage too many people to do reckless things resulting in our current recession.
Here’s an excerpt from today’s New York Times:
Alyssa Katz, a New York journalist and the author of “Our Lot,” could no doubt have landed an exotic mortgage when her rent-regulated loft building went upscale condo. But she concluded the deal wasn’t worth it, and moved “off the map” into deepest Brooklyn (and probably found ways to feel good about it, even as she admits to checking the sales history of friends’ homes on PropertyShark.com).
But “Our Lot” is less a personal tale than a trenchant chronicle of how “all that had been sacred about home lending” was upended, through a series of government policies that were enacted with seemingly noble intentions — broadening home ownership and priming the economic pump — but ended up turning homes into profit centers rather than places to live. At “the nadir of the insanity in 2006,” she notes, an estimated “two out of every five homes in Sacramento and vicinity had been bought by someone seeking to resell within two years.”
More…
