Before the housing crash, people were doing some idiotic things with houses. They'd buy way over their heads thinking about all the money they'd make when they sold it 5 or 10 years later. They didn't think about how much they'd lose to interest in the meantime. Some friends of my brother did that. They were using thrift store furniture in a high dollar house because they couldn't afford decent stuff. They got hurt pretty bad in the crash.
My wife and I got married in '08. 2 years before she'd bought an old house to renovate and resell. It would have been a good idea if the crash hadn't happened. We sold it for slightly more than what she owed on it so we didn't have to go with a short sale but she lost quite a bit of the cash she'd spend on the renovation. The market there still hasn't come up 8 years later so keeping it would have cost us more yet.
