We can't because Barney Frank screwed the housing market in the US and we'd all have to take a financial loss to move to the utopias of DC or Canada.
WHAT...Where have you been burying your head....
The housing market mess was over 90% caused by the Subprime mortgages...being bundled in with good mortgages and then selling them off as good mortgage. Then a company like AIG which insured these mortgages. Here's how it worked...Someone gets a mortgage that barely qualifies...plus the house is not in a nice neighborhood and probably won't see much growth potential. The banks (JP Morgan was the mastermind of this screwed up plan) broke up these mortgages into small chunks...then took good mortgages from people who easily qualified and who's homes were in a moderate to high growth area and also broke them into small chunks. The banks then took the chunks of both of these mortgages and bundled them together and sold them as "PRIME" mortgages. Then when the real estate bubble burst these "Prime" mortgages turned out to be "Sub Prime". And when this was finally realized (actually it was realized by many economists years earlier, but the banks did NOTHING to prevent it)...it was too late and just caused the mortgages to default...and AIG had to get bailed out because they couldn't afford to cover the insured mortgages.
The was part one...part 2 is because of the bubble mortgage lenders were defrauding banks by qualifying people for mortgages who were NOT qualified and never should have been qualified. It worked for a while because the housing market was on a rise...and these people who weren't qualified...after a year they just flipped the house and made a nice profit. But when the housing market bubble burst...the profits went away and now these people had to default on the loan which they never should have been given in the first place.
Many people want to blame Fannie Mae..but in truth they only accounted for a small percentage of the defaulted mortgages.