Dr. Mike Walden, North Carolina Cooperative Extension economist in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at N.C. State University, responds:

"Well, first of all, you had a situation earlier in this decade where there was a lot of money to loan to home buyers. That money was provided by the Federal Reserve. But this also allowed the demographics to take effect. And simply put, in the earlier part of this decade, the demographic groups that were susceptible to buying homes were increasing. For example, you had a significant increase in folks in their 20s. Now, these folks are typically renters, but when you had low interest rates and ample money to buy homes, they moved into the home buying market. You also had growth in the 40-year-old range of people. These are typically people who were trading up to bigger homes. Again they were ripe to buy new homes. And then finally you had an increase in the so-called empty nesters, those people who were 50 years old or older. It's time for them to move beyond the home they raised their kids in. The only demographic group that was not growing at this time were 30 year olds. So the point here is that you had this conflux of demographic power, really, here to take advantage of those lower interest rates. Now of course the housing bust came when the Federal Reserve took the money away."