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Do you suppose this is what Bush means by the "ownership society"?

“We can’t just get overly obsessed with getting people into homeownership,” says Nicolas Retsinas, director of Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. “We have to make sure they stay in homeownership.” He notes that the biggest revolution in mortgage lending in the past seven years is an automated underwriting system that has expanded lending opportunities for low-income families, but it has yet to be tested in a slow economy. (See Shelterforce #125.)

Such tests appear to be coming. Defaults on loans in 2000 amounted to approximately one million households losing their homes to foreclosure, during the height of an unprecedented economic expansion. As the economy has softened, those numbers have worsened, with delinquencies and foreclosures on all loans rising steadily and reaching an all-time high in the second quarter of 2002. Foreclosures on FHA-backed loans to low-income households have risen the fastest, to a rate of nearly 3 percent, with an additional 12 percent behind in their payments in the second quarter of 2002.

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