While the desire to open the dream of home ownership to every person who would like to buy a house may be commendable and mostly rooted in good intentions, it has actually cheapened the dream and irrevocably eroded its meaning.

Home ownership has long been the golden ticket for entering the American middle class.  Not only does it create wealth through equity growth, it also supplies the owner with that true emblem of having made it: a mortgage interest tax deduction.  Beyond the economic self interest of owning a home, however, there resides an even deeper meaning: home ownership gives a person a place not just in the physical community of a region but in the spiritual community as well, home owners belong in a way that seems to elude renters.  One need only watch this week's television production of A Raisin in the Sun to be reminded of the deep roots that buying a house has in the communal psyche of people of all colors and economic classes. 

Race, gender and sexual orientation should never be barriers to home ownership.  Still - like the self esteem, everyone gets a trophy thinking that has lowered educational standards - the idea that all financial barriers to home ownership should be eradicated has actually worked against the building of neighborhoods which it was meant to engender.  When there is no effort, when there is no investment - either personal or financial - there is no pride of ownership.  Habitat for Humanity has been so successful because it requires those who receive homes to provide sweat when they cannot provide money.  As Nicolas P. Retsinas, director of harvards's Joint Center for Housing Studies astutely noted in Friday's NYT "some borrowers were renting (with risk) rather than owning" - thus allowing them to walk away more easily, in some cases blaming the mortgage companies rather than themselves and quite often feeling no shame whatsoever.

There are homeowners for whom foreclosure is the least of many bad, painful choices which are beyond their control.  A person should never have to choose between caring for an ill loved one or losing his/her home.  A person who has lost a job should be given every reasonable chance to retool his/her life without losing his/her home.  The government should protect people in these circumstances and offer as much help and wise counsel as is possible.  For those of us who just refinanced and lived up our homes, who were in homes that we could not afford or did not cherish as we should have - we should be ashamed.

The proudest and happiest moments of my life - no contest - have always derived from my son.  Second to those moments, the proudest and happiest moment of my life was the day I accepted the keys to our house at the relatively late age of 42.  It was a day I had despaired of ever seeing.  The saddest day of my life - no contest - was the day my daddy died; the day my son and I gave our home up to foreclosure is a distant, distant second to my father's death; that same day though is without a doubt the most shameful day of my life.  I had failed as a mother by losing my son's home.  I had failed as a daughter by not living up to the high standards set for me by my parents who - with less financial wherewithal than I had when I owned my home - never even made a late payment on the homes I lived in as a child.  I had failed as a member of the community.  I had failed as an intelligent person; while there was fraud in the last refi mortgage I took on my house, there is no excuse for the stupidity and greed that let up to that final step. 

This is not to say that foreclosure should permanently damage a person, in some ways I believe - I know - I am a better, smarter, stronger person than I was before the foreclosure.  My son - while I am sure he will carry the marks of losing his home forever - has rebounded with a strength and a maturity that humble me; he should never, ever bear any shame or stigma from things that were my doing.

Nor are my blame and my shame meant to relieve the banking industry of the blame and the shame that it should shoulder; men and women who were more financially learned than I, men and women whom I trusted, were as stupid as I was and even greedier.  It took both them and me to do it, but between us we have managed in less than a generation to devalue a standard that it took centuries to create.  Greed, stupidity, easy credit and lack of responsiblity have debilitated our entire system of home ownership.  If this downturn were to play out in the massive restructuring of home prices and credit that would truly cure the disease, home owners who did everything right would suffer as much as those of us who did virtually everythng wrong. 

My son and I will continue to recover and move on beyond our personal misfortune; I am not sure the same can be said of the American dream of home ownership.