heather wagenhals is a columnist, speaker broadcaster and author on matters of finance - you're also a licensed real estate broker yet you say home ownership is a huge economic scam? > >it can be and it's a shame because i grew up here in arizona and we saw the boom of all of the development. and with what happened, we have kind of created this myth about homeownership that everybody was entitled to it and it kind of started in the 90's. after we got the rtc cleaning up our real estate market after our first banking debacle---we saw unprecedented growth. but the growth that we saw at the turn of the century had nothing to do with home ownership or value. it started simply with scarcity in our marketplace and then with the advent of all of these loans, we got people into homeownership who weren't ready and prepared for that investment. > >heather, is this a problem right now or will this always be the case? is this because of the recession we just came through? will it once again be the best asset and the best investment we can make? > >it could be but it depends on what your goals ar