by Calculated Risk on 10/01/2005 10:50:00 PM

The NYTimes offers a few anecdotes of homeowners using their houses as ATMs. This has allowed homeowners in financial trouble to stall off bankruptcy. A few quotes from the article:

"When you're living in a place with home values up 50 percent, you have what Alan Greenspan calls a piggy bank," said Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard law professor and an author of "The Fragile Middle Class" (Yale University Press, 2000), a study of bankruptcy. "The bubble has operated like wreckage from the Titanic - you could climb on and float along for a while. The question is for how long."
...
"Some people have been spared filing the petitions because they have home equity," said Andrew Thaler, a bankruptcy trustee on Long Island. "My guess is when the housing market flattens, people are not going to be able to sustain the lifestyle they've been maintaining, and you'll suddenly see a lot more bankruptcies."
...
"Two or three years ago, mortgage companies were giving money to anyone," Mr. [Heath Berger, a bankruptcy lawyer in Woodbury] said. "They didn't care whether they could afford it, just that they had a house. Now I'm seeing all these people who never had the income to pay these loans in trouble."

Professor Warren of Harvard believes that disaster lurks as homeowners borrow against their homes to forestall bankruptcy. When the stock market tumbled five years ago, people in trouble could sell stocks to stay afloat, she said. But home equity doesn't work the same way. As she put it, "You can't sell a part of your home like you could a stock in the stock market bubble."
...
"When a family uses its home like a piggy bank and then a job loss, a divorce or an increase in the adjustable-rate mortgage leaves them unable to make the payments, the family is out of options," Professor Warren said. "That's true before and after Oct. 17. Borrowing against a home leaves a family with the fewest possible options when something goes wrong."

"After Oct. 17, bankruptcy gets harder for everyone - more expensive, more traps, less coverage," she said. "And that means more families are set up to lose their homes."

Housing prices do not need to fall, just flatten, and then I believe serious problems will be revealed.