COMMENTARY: Housing is a Moral Issue; Ministry Needed When Bubble Bursts

c. 2005 Religion News Service (UNDATED) Unlike the World Series of Poker, today’s high-stakes housing boom isn’t a spectator sport where only card players with ready cash lose. The financial, emotional and moral well-being of millions of Americans is on the line. The faith community needs to get ready for crisis ministry. Housing prices and […]

c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Unlike the World Series of Poker, today’s high-stakes housing boom isn’t a spectator sport where only card players with ready cash lose.

The financial, emotional and moral well-being of millions of Americans is on the line. The faith community needs to get ready for crisis ministry.


Housing prices and square footage are soaring as personal income and job growth remain flat. In suburbs, $500,000 houses become routine. Close-in houses soar past $1 million. Starter-home bungalows become “tear-downs,” to be replaced by mega-houses. Tract housing gives way to fields of “McMansions.” Speculators scoop up new housing to resell at a profit.

Home buyers eager to catch the boom “go all in,” as they say in poker, with high-risk mortgage schemes and debt loads well beyond common-sense levels. Families with moderate incomes push into exurbia, two hours from work, in search of affordable housing. More and more find themselves priced out.

“The housing market is rapidly losing touch with reality,” says Fortune magazine.

What will happen if _ or when, say some analysts _ the bubble bursts, as the stock market frenzy did in 1929? As in poker, a few will emerge big winners. Many, however, will find themselves stuck and desperate, with houses they can neither sell nor afford to own, with “paper profits” evaporating and retirement savings languishing in a non-liquid asset. How do you accept a job transfer when you can’t sell here or buy there? How do you retire when you can’t downsize or escape high monthly payments?

As with any bursting economic bubble, most will see it too late, and the impact of loss will cascade through the economy and hit the poor hardest.

What does this have to do with faith communities? It is a pastoral crisis and moral crisis.

Our congregations will have many wounded souls, not only financially strapped, but scared and feeling betrayed, as the biggest investment they will ever make turns sour, as one of life’s bedrock values _ home _ becomes an unaffordable extravagance.

Many will be confused, because prosperity has become a quasi-theology of its own, a tangible proof that God favors them. Also, religious passions focused on culture wars, morality crusades and church-political squabbles might have some difficulty turning to what Jesus actually did say, namely, his teachings on the snares and delusions of wealth.


Whether it comes across as compassion or scolding, the housing-troubled will find the good news that “one’s life doesn’t consist in the abundance of possessions,” and that humility is the way to God. They will encounter Jesus as he was _ not a tight-lipped moralizer, but an itinerant rabbi who owned nothing, called disciples away from financial security, and urged people to “make purses for yourselves that do not wear out.”

Some will find such assurances less alluring than the buy-high-sell-higher math of the housing boom. So it goes. For the housing boom isn’t just a shaky investment strategy, precipitating a pastoral crisis. It is a moral crisis as well, the very moral crisis that Jesus spent much of his ministry addressing.

The rush to extravagance and speculation involves overvaluing wealth, placing too much reliance on works of human hands, seeking to express oneself in house size rather than heart size, seeking to own at the expense of another’s not-owning, turning the home into proof of personal worthiness rather than a haven for loved ones. For some, it is dreams gone over the top. For some, it is the victory of greed, the one corruption that troubled Jesus more than any other.

Good moral vision can come of this. The Great Depression, after all, shaped a generation that learned to save and to live modestly.

MO/RB END RNS

(Tom Ehrich is a writer, consultant and leader of workshops. His forthcoming book, “Just Wondering, Jesus: 100 Questions People Want to Ask,” will be published by Morehouse Publishing. An Episcopal priest, he lives in Durham, N.C. His Web site is http://www.onajourney.org.)

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