The mortgage mess.  Subprime.  Mortgage fraud. 

Wall Street.  Builders.  Lenders.  Foreclosures.

Option ARMS.  Derivatives.  NINJA Financing.

Chances are that if you've been paying attention at all over the last year or so, you've heard all of these terms.  If you haven't, I invite you to crawl out of your shoebox and open your eyes to the world we live in.

How'd we get here?  Who's to blame?  Why did this happen to us?

Explanations abound throughout the media and around the internet, but perhaps no other explanation hits it on the head as the one contained in Alyssa Katz's book, "Our Lot: How Real Estate Came to Own Us"  Alyssa Katz teaches journalism at New York University and works as an editorial consultant with the Pratt Center for Community Development.

I recently finished reading her informative and education book detailing the past and current history of the lending dramas we see unfolding around the real estate industry every day.  "Our Lot" reads more like a thriller or intriguing novel rather than a typical real estate tutorial.  In easy to understand language and colorful stories of subdivisions around the country, Alyssa Katz opens up the mysteries of the mortgage and housing collapse that has dominated the news.

Here's a few poignant excerpts to whet your palate:

From Page 29:  "Clinton instructed the Secret Service to bring the Kastens in the limow with him to their next stop.  In the backseat he had more questions: How had they found their home and their loan?  Hom much had they paid?  What were their closing costs?  Then he pointed out the McDonald's where he bought his coffee after his run every morning.  They were on their way to the Homeownership Summit, a grand event the Clinton administration pulled together at the Omni Shoreham to show off its efforts, over the previous year, to increase the number of homeowners in America to unprecedented heights."

From Page 66: "And so Margaret Newton of Philadelphia, who only wanted to redo the siding on her house--to cover up graffiti and keep the place warm, or so she hoped--instead ended up with a $15,500 laon she had no way of paying back.  Four strokes [of her pen] had left the seventy-six-year-old barely mobile and living on Social Security"

From Page 181: "Even as he urges his Florida crowd to buy his self-published series of books on how to "Flip and Grow Rich"--at $95, a bargain--two dozen of his houses in Texas have already been foreclosed on by his financier, midflip... Monteleongo doesn't share this information."

In my opinion, "Our Lot" should be required reading for anyone in the mortgage or real estate industry and should a book that REALTORS and lenders recommend to their clients when they ask "What Happened?"

Read "Our Lot"

You'll learn a LOT!