Bet It All On the House
What about those families with middle-class aspirations who earned a little less than average or those who lived in a particularly expensive city? Even with both parents in the workforce, they have fallen behind. Rather than drop out of the bidding war [for suitable homes] and resign themselves to sending their kids to weaker schools, many middle-class couples have seized on another way to fund their dream home: take on a bigger mortgage. In 1980, the mortgage lending industry was effectively deregulated. As a result, average families could find plenty of banks willing to issue them larger mortgages relative to their incomes. As the bidding war heated up, families took on larger and larger mortgages just to keep up, committing themselves to debt loads that were unimaginable just a generation earlier.
— Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi, The Two-Income Trap
