[mulmen]

Going in to a mortgage without a plan for the market tanking and being upside down means you shouldn't have gone into the mortgage. They can stay in the house and continue making the payments they can afford. They can afford the payments, right? Right??

If they can't then they fall back on some social safety net that prevents bad decisions from being ruinous. Our lack of these mechanisms is why we have to keep propping housing up. The problem is we can't keep doing that.