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Lisa and Alan began their search, however, things were a little less frenzied. Where advertisements once stressed urgency ( Don’t miss out! ), now they highlighted deals (Was $400K, now $350K! ). The professionals pitched it as a moment for bargain hunting, “a great time to buy.” Lisa wondered if they would ever consider it a bad time.
    In truth, the housing bubble had begun its long decline. If you scanned the back of the business pages, you knew it.Ameriquest, one of the biggest mortgage lenders in the country, abruptly closed all its retail branches in the middle of 2006.New Century Financial, another giant, faced a hugecash shortfall that summer, and would go bankrupt the following spring. Homeowners felt the crunch as well; foreclosure rates doubled within three years. For most ordinary Americans, even prospective home buyers, these warning signs stayed far in the background. And you could still find optimists among economic analysts.As Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke testified to the Joint Economic Committee in early 2007, “The impact on the broader economy and financial markets of the problems in the subprime market seems likely to be contained.” In other words, there would only be one foreclosure wave, not two, flushing out only those who bought too much house and borrowed too much money. Young families with steady incomes, like Lisa and Alan, didn’t have to worry.
    But while Ben Bernanke didn’t foresee a crisis, Florida home builders knew the machine that had sustained profits for the last decade was seizing up. They needed to dump their remaining homes before the market collapsed. Subdivisions halfway through construction suddenly listed all their properties for sale. Developers hired landscapers and quickly poured asphalt for streets. They cut prices to reel in shoppers and flush inventory off their books. Those looking for homes thought they were smartly buying low, but they were actually the last unsuspecting souls lured into the housing bubble’s trap. Lisa didn’t pay much attention. She was pregnant, still working full-time, and low on energy.
    One day Alan asked Lisa to stop by a house on Gazetta Way, in a brand-new gated community built by D.R. Horton, one of America’s largest developers. She made the trip to the development, twenty minutes west of the Atlantic Ocean, down one of the wide boulevards that seemed to stretch endlessly through south Florida. The homes inside the gate looked gargantuan, dwarfing the tiny, just-planted palm trees scattered about. To the left was a standard item in Florida subdivisions: the giant, purposeless manmade lake, with a fountain shooting water skyward. Lisa called Alan and asked if he was sure the house was on Gazetta Way. “These look like college dorms, not homes!” Alan assured her she was in the right place.
    The model Alan picked out was the most affordable on the block. But Lisa frowned before walking inside. Despite the relative modesty—neighbors’ homes towered close on either side—the house was almost three times the size of her co-op. The front door opened to a giant room with high ceilings that Lisa found pointless. Mazelike corridors spilled into bedroomssplit between opposite sides of the house. Lisa hated the idea of having to walk through the giant unusable room to attend to her child in the night. The kitchen had no windows, but the bedroom windows looked directly into the neighbor’s property, with zero space in between. Lisa thought she could reach out her hand and actually touch the neighbor’s house, at least if the windows would open.
    Lisa stepped outside to a tiny backyard patio bracketed by two saplings, and a few feet beyond that was a thin canal containing something resembling a liquid substance. It hardly compared to Lisa’s view of the water. Everything about the house seemed rushed and slapped together. She had no interest in the place. But Alan did, and so did