I have to tell you that when I see a commercial on TV about someone receiving help from the state (California) of $79K, or $98K, or $64K from a program designed "to keep people in their homes," I get a little pissed. I'm sympathetic to homeowners who made unfortunate decisions and wound up under water on their mortgages, and were on the verge of being evicted, but what about renters who face gigantic rent increases and are priced out of the market. Where's the help to keep them from losing their homes? And yeah. I know that an abandoned house is a blight, but it just shows you how everything is geared towards home ownership. Renters, eh, we're a dime a dozen. As far as the government is concerned, we're second-class citizens.

People keep on tooting the horn of the city, but smaller non-urbanized cities and towns are where the quality of life and affordable housing up and down the board still are. We're not getting Hong Kong-like density where everyone is part of the urban fabric, we're getting density for the well-off and sweeping everyone else away to the outskirts or ridiculous tiny little space/$ living spaces.

Nobody's buying because it is next to impossible to amass the tens of thousands of dollars you need for a down payment without getting pillaged another $300-400+ a month for insurance and fees on those terrible first-time-buyer low or no-down loans. I wouldn't have had my childhood home in the 80s were it not for a large gift to my parents from some distant family member.

Wherever rents are getting out of reach of low double-digit-per-hour wage workers, home ownership is part of the upper-class wealth system. In the midwest or plains states where real estate can still be had for the $1XXk range, the jobs that used to allow middle-class home ownership are drying up. Things were great for lots of folks post-war and every boom since then has increasingly pulled the chances away from those who grew up in lower classes.

@1 - Boom and bust, the American way. I'm guessing what you're seeing is ads for leftover TARP money from back when we wanted people to be able to stay in their homes before we wanted them out of their homes to make room for more homes. It'd be kinda funny if it weren't not really funny.

@2 The housing crisis will exist as long as cities like SF and Seattle have a vast disproportionate share of the jobs. As long as that fact remains, housing prices will increase as long as (local job growth)>(local housing growth), to break the cycle housing must outpace job growth.

@2 The problem with the smaller, cheaper places to live is that the jobs aren't there. It's great if you can make Seattle money and work remotely in wherever, or if you can cash out your Seattle home and go somewhere and buy a house with cash...and then somehow find a job you can work from there, but otherwise: cheap places are cheap because they're not desirable. A place with no jobs is not a good place to live.

The 2008 crash may not have been pre-engineered by the rich to squeeze yet more from the middle class, but they did not hesitate a moment to do so once the crash had happened.

@5 the choice is not big huge city or middle of nowhere moron bullshitland. You need to travel a little more if that's how you think the country is split up. 100k-ish cities have plenty of jobs for educated people so long as their uber-rich population is relatively small. Rich assholes love Portland, so they are enjoying a collapse at a similar but slower pac. Rich assholes don't want to live in Eugene so you can still buy a nice house for $175-300k and even find decent used cars for less than $4000 all day long. It's the upper-er 6-figure-salary classes that come and ruin it for everyone else.