What Caused the Real Estate Crisis?

Digging for the roots of the real estate crisis, Alyssa Katz finds an American culture that believed home ownership would repair broken neighborhoods by increase people’s investment in them. “Access to fair credit for everyone was presented to minority residents in particular as the solution to everything from poverty to crime. The problem, Katz says, lay in the rapid deregulation of mortgage loans to give urban poor that access. ‘This isn’t just the story about a terrible, misguided campaign,’ she points out. ‘One of the great tragedies here was that the misguided efforts that were driven by politics and greed and naiveté had grown out of a Civil Rights Movement push to promote access to home ownership.'”