A House Is a Home

The thousands of city dwellers who bought a home in Levittown and millions of others elsewhere was for the purpose of establishing a homestead in which to build a family, or enhance its lifestyle—surely, they were not thinking of making an investment, or furthest from their mind that the $8000 Levitt home in 1948 could be worth $7000 in 1949. Of course, the moneychangers of "irrational exuberance" in ensuing decades saw it differently. Promote the euphoria of suburbia to insure a rising housing price index and thus the miracle of the home becoming a bank. Even before Greenspan’s warning fell on deaf ears even his own and the telecommunications bubble burst, there was the S&L scandal in the ‘80s that should have served as a yellow light in the housing bubble. The so-called tickle down theory led to a cascade of indiscretion—not to mention the Madoff destruction—causing investments of phantom profits and eventual disaster.