The atmosphere of ownership and the securitization of mortgates did us in

The Nation - The House Folds: The Housing Market and Irrational Exuberance
http://www.thenation.com/article/house-folds-housing-market-and-irrational-exuberance/

In many ways, we never got past the irrational exuberance that fueled the stock market rises in the 90s. It migrated to the housing market where the culture of ownership and the American dream of owning your own home caused intelligent people to miss some clear warning signs of an impending bust. This (long) article reviews the works of Robert Shiller (Irrational Exuberance and The Subprime Solution) and Mark Zandi (Financial Shock) and compares them to an earlier housing skeptic, John Dean (Home Ownership, Is It Sound?) from the mid 1940s. Shiller argues that it was a culture of expansion, of ownership, of 'boom thinking' that was the ultimate culprit for the housing bust. Zandi focuses more on the removal of responsibility in the financial system, the passing of the bad buck from consumer to lender to investment banker to investor. In the end, article points to some of the fundamental problems in America's housing industry, one of which is that we've failed in many ways to democratize home ownership significantly in the last three decades.