If nothing changes in America, it looks as though the United States will continue to have severe housing bubbles for the next century. The reason is simple. Americans are taught to regard home ownership as a form of cultural citizenship. Freecreditreport.com even suggests that it’s better to be a bachelor who owns a home in a suburb with a dog and a yard than to marry a “dream girl” who has bad credit.

As long as home ownership is regarded as a badge of cultural citizenship in America, the government will come under strong political pressure to force banks to lend to people who wouldn’t otherwise afford their homes. The illusion of home ownership has come close to becoming an entitlement. And home ownership is an illusion so long as the house is mortgaged to the bank.

Is a low comparative rate of home ownership among black people a scandal or not? I suggest that it is not a scandal principally because home ownership should not a metric to measure a person’s well being and certainly not a metric to measure a person’s “Americanness”. Yet, a critical mass of Americans do regard home ownership to be a metric of “Americanness”, so the political pressure for government intervention in the housing market will continue to be relentless.