The Long History of American Home Debt

Not long after the economic crisis began, the president's landmark Conference on Homeownership reported that "down payments of 10 percent, 5 percent, and even nothing down" had become common practice in the home-mortgage market. Reliance on second mortgages and novel financing terms, the report noted, were also widespread.

Although these developments sound all too familiar, this Conference on Homeownership was held in 1931 and the president sponsoring it was Herbert Hoover, not George W. Bush or Barack Obama. We often think of the expansion of easy mortgage financing as a relatively recent development, but the growth of indebted homeownership has older and more complicated origins.