[oh8eleven]

paying twice what your house is worth is not a good thing either.
No one paid twice what the house was worth. They paid exactly what the house was worth at the time they bought it.
In fact, they thought the house would be worth a lot more in a very short time and they were wrong.
If you bought your house planning on living there for 15-30 years, you can live with the market fluctuation.

[M. Dodge Thomas]

A depressed area like Detroit is a good example of a place where walking away from an underwater mortgage in order to move out-of-state and look for work is a far more rational choice than burning through your savings to keep the house while hoping that the local economy will turn around.

[allmost]

I think you may be using a rather large brush to characterize other’s circumstances. Some are first time buyers. Some get screwed with nefarious brokers. Some may have personal financial issues which happen in life. When someone buys a house for say $300,000 and someone 2 years later says it's only worth $190,000 things get complicated.

[Future Snake Eater]

If you bought your house planning on living there for 15-30 years, you can live with the market fluctuation.

Unless you lost your job or your job required you to move. Guess those people are bums, though.

[The Antiyuppie]

The bubble was just the “bigger fool” theory in action. We marveled here at how people could be spending $700,000 for a hovel in Southern California...but those who bought those homes assumed that even bigger fools would pay $900,000 for those shacks in six months. All bubbles work this way, going back to the Dutch tulip mania.