Today's mortgage crisis has been blamed on lenders, and it has been blamed in "irresponsible borrowers, who bought houses they couldn't afford." While mortgage lenders and home-buyers have all had a hand in creating the existing crisis, placing the blame on either or both overlooks a deeper problem that, upon first glance at the bigger picture, can remain obscured.

I, personally, would not have been comfortable with an adjustable rate mortgage; and I'm not saying the people who signed on for them are entirely blameless for doing so. Still, young families are faced with living where houses are less expensive and jobs are low paying or hard to find; or else living where the jobs are and where the homes cost more. Where I live (Massachusetts) it would be a very rare house that sold for under $300,000. Rents for decent two-bedroom apartments are, on average, in the area of at $1700 a month. There are people today who are earning a rate of pay that I earned back in the 1970's. Of course, that pay today would be the low end (when it wasn't back then), but a "high-average-end" house back then sold for, perhaps, $85,000 (4 bedroom with two and a half baths, an acre of land, a full attic, a family room). There is no "low-end" house today for $85,000 (to go along with how pays have gone up but not gone up at the same rates that home prices have).

So, today's young families are faced with deciding to have no children (possibly ever - and everyone has a right to a have a family, particularly the hard-working thirty-somethings who got an education and waited to have children), and not need that three-bedroom home (or apartment for however much that would cost them); or try to do the "sensible thing" of at least putting their monthly housing money into equity. Yes, they took a gamble; but in fairness to them, many felt they didn't have a choice (unless, again, they wanted to forego having a family - but that's a little too much to expect of people in their thirties). For people a little older, children may have outgrown the little apartment or small home they had. A whole lot of people felt pressured to buy a home before the prices went up yet farther beyond reach.

Giving a couple of thousand dollars a month away in rent money meant people weren't doing what would make the best use of their money. Twenty-five years ago a $72,000 home would jump up in price about $20,000 in one year. About five years ago, a young couple I know, who had bought a home, discovered a year later the same house has jumped up $100,000. Regardless of how old people are, unless they're doing awfully, awfully, well it is very difficult to save up, say,$ 200,000 in order to get the mortgage on a basic split- level home in Massachusetts down to, say, $220,000.

The average family (and even the above average family who doesn't have an overabundance of money) felt pushed into making that "sound" investment, where, at least, there was the hope of giving their family a home, keeping their equity, and possibly re-financing later. Many, I'm sure, took that gamble because they felt it was the only choice that had. Banks were ready to lend the money to these desperate people, probably partly because so many of them knew there was no way a lot of even high-ish earners could buy a house. There was, quite simply, a demand for "easier" mortgages. Without mortgages $450,000 don't sell, and there are consequences to a widely paralyzed housing market as well.

It is easy for those people who bought their homes for $20,000, $70,000 or even $90,000, to have an opinion about what young families in recent years should have done, when faced with horrendous rents (even in bad neighborhoods) versus trying to buy a home. It's easy for someone who is young and hasn't yet had a family to have an opinion too. People don't get to choose the economy and housing market they'll find themselves in when they're at the age of building their family.

Chances are none of them would have chosen to take out adjustable rate mortgages if they had a choice of finding a place to live with more than one bedroom for a whole family, or a two-bedroom apartment with someone sleeping in the living room. These people were raised to believe that you just grow up, get an education, earn a good living, have your family, and provide a home for that family. They thought they were living life the way their parents had, and the way that is good for families to live.

Anyone who squirms these days when he has to fill his gas tank more than he had hoped he'd have to that week should understand what it's like to live when prices are beyond control, and more than even people with good jobs can comfortably afford. Maybe some people would like to see Americans do what people in some other countries do, which is live ten-people-to-a-small apartment and bike to a job that pays a few dollars an hour. If that happens the country will not be the same one we've come to know. (That would, of course, not bother some people around the globe. In fact, it would please many. The American Dream, however, has never been about sharing a small apartment with another family; so, right or wrong, such a situation would be a serious decline in our quality of life.)

This housing thing isn't necessarily about a bunch of irresponsible people and equally irresponsible banks just "going wild" for the fun of it. It's about a complicated set of issues related to the bigger picture, that should have been addressed over the last couple of decades.

The parents of the Baby Boom generation bought homes in which to raise their children. Many made sure their children could go to college if they chose to. The American Dream of raising children to get a good education and good job in order to provide their own families with a nice standard of living was shared by the Baby Boom generation, as the next generation of families was built. The goal of getting an education, getting married, buying a house, and building a family was considered an "ideal" - and yet millions of couples chose to aim to build that kind of life for themselves and their families. After all, we are a society that often disdains getting little education, having babies as unmarried couples, and bringing those babies into poverty and the neighborhoods that go with that poverty.

The children of the first wave of Baby Boomers, along with others who felt pressured to buy a home before the prices went yet higher, are a generation for whom four-year degrees are common, and for whom those four-year degrees, alone, don't necessarily bring in a very high income. Graduate degrees increase earning potential but cost a lot of money to get. With the idea that getting a good education "at all costs" is well worth it in the end, the generation that followed the Baby Boomers has often been burdoned not just with the usual high cost of living, but with school loans as well. This often hard-working group of people with young families was faced with increasingly high rents. Most would not have wanted government assistance with housing, but even if they did they would not have been eligible.

As they watched houses get farther and farther beyond their reach, and as they saw rents that were already high continue to go up, many of these sensible, hard-working, Americans believed that "throwing their money away on rent" was not financially wise, and that investing in a home was. At least their money would grow. Some could even be said to have panicked. After all,

if they didn't own a home and rents continued to go up, where would they be if rents rose beyond what they could afford?

Can the mortgage crisis be blamed on the people who were simply trying to use their money most sensibly, while providing a home for their families? Were they really being "irresponsible"?

Can it even be blamed on all lenders, who adjusted their practices to meet the needs and demand of a market that believed risky financing was a better gamble than the "sure thing" of throwing rent money "out the window"? Not all foreclosures are tied to predatory lenders. Some of those adjustable rate mortgages have been with reputable banks as well.

As with so many complex problems, the causes of the current mortgage crisis go deeper than just a matter of too many adjustable rate mortgages agreed upon by too many irresponsible and greedy people. There''s no doubt that if one were to look at the problem, greed and lack of responsibility could be found in some places and some cases. Upon closer look, however, one would see that the story of the present mortgage crisis goes a lot deeper.