The modern myth of the American dream is that anyone who works hard will be successful in a material fashion. However, the recent credit crisis in the housing market has illustrated that an easy trajectory to upward mobility for the deserving through material gains is a myth rather than a reality. The American dream has long been a dream bought on credit, rather than something substantiated in fact.
             For example, take the American dream of home ownership. "The American dream of buying and owning a home all too frequently doesn't have a happy ending for many low-income families. Despite federal government policies encouraging home ownership among minority and low-income families, more than half of them left their houses and returned to renting within five years" (Schwartz 2004). Moreover, many of these low-income minority families bought homes in "distressed" neighborhoods, which means that the "areas continued to be significantly more disadvantaged, marked by elevated levels of poverty, high school dropouts and unemployment compared to low-income whites" (Schwartz 2004).
             Not only was economic mobility achieved, but better school integration was also not created. Nor did these low-income minority families who temporally owned homes have a substantially better quality of life. Perhaps even more critically, this also means that the children of these transient home buyers did not substantially improve their lives. Was this home ownership worth the cost? "Thirty out of the 55 families were paying more than 50 percent of their combined monthly income on their mortgage payments...Home ownership is an important dream in our society....But the goal should be to keep families in their own homes," and that means homes they can afford, in areas better than the areas where they were renting apartments (Schwartz 2004).
             Merely owning a home, despite the American ideal of home ownership for everyone,...