As someone who was poor when buying my first house in 2006 it was incredibly easy. I'm closing on a house on Tuesday and the process has been 10 times more difficult because of new Fed regulations.
It never should have been that easy. It was OK if you were a responsible person, but it was all fun and games for the irresponsible.
As in irresponsible you mean the sub prime lenders and the investmet banks offering CDOs right?
To some extent, yes. But it does boil down to people accepting these loans that knew were too good to be true and believing they could buy a home that is way out of their price range. Most believed they would get into the house, then turn around and sell it before the higher interest rate kicked in and be rolling in the dough.
There also had to be someone there to buy these bad loans, and that was fannie and freddy, our gov.