School teacher Shana Richey misses the play room she decorated with Glamour Girl decals for her daughters. Fireman Jay Fernandez misses the custom putting green he installed in his back yarD、But ever since they quit paying their mortgages and walked away from their homes, they’ve discovered that giving up on theAmerican dream has its benefits.Both now live on the 3,100 block ofClub RanchoDrive in Palmdale, where a terrible housing market lets them rent luxurious homes—one with a pool for the kids, the other with a golf-course view—for a fraction of their former monthly payments. "It’s just a better life. It really is," says Ms. Richey.Before defaulting on her mortgage, she owed about $ 230,000 more than the home was worth. People’s increasing willingness to abandon their own piece ofAmerica illustrates a paradoxical change wrought by the housing bust:Even as it tarnishes the near-sacred image of home ownership, it might be clearing the way for an economic recovery. Thanks to a rare confluence of factors—mortgages that far exceed home values and bargain-basement rents—a growing number of families are concluding that the newAmerican dream home is a rental. Some are leaving behind their homes and mortgages right away, while others are simply halting payments until the bank kicks them out. That’s freeing up cash to use in other ways. Ms. Richey’s family of five used some of the money to buy season tickets toDisneyland, and plans to take aCarnival cruise to Mexico in March. Mr. Fernandez takes his girlfriend out to dinner more frequently. "We’re saving lots of money," Ms. Richey says. The U. S. home-ownership rate has charted its biggest decline in more than two decades, falling to 67.6% as of September from a peak of 69.2% in 2004.And more renters are on the way:Credit firmExperian and consulting firm Oliver Wyman forecast that "strategic defaults" by homeowners who can afford to pay are likely to exceed one million in 2009, more than four times 2007’s level. Stiffing the bank is bad for peoples’ credit, and bad for banks. Swelling defaults could also mean more losses for taxpayers through bank bailouts. Analysts atDeutscheBank Securities expect 21 million U. S. households to end up owing more on their mortgages than their homes are worth by the end of 2010. If one in five of those households default, the losses to banks and investors could exceed $ 400 billion.As a proportion of the economy, that’s roughly equivalent to the losses suffered in the savings-and-loan debacle of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The flip side of those losses, though, is massive debt relief that can help offset the pain of rising unemployment and put cash in consumers’ pockets. For the 4. 8 million U. S. households that data provider LPSAppliedAnalytics estimates haven’t paid their mortgages in at least three months, the added cash flow could amount to about $ 5 billion a month—an injection that in the long term could be worth more than the tax breaks in the Obama administration’s economic-stimulus package. "It’s a stealth stimulus," saysChristopher Thornberg ofBeaconEconomics, a consulting firm specializing in real estate and theCalifornia economy. "The quicker these people shed their debts, the faster the economy is going to heal and move forward again. " As the stigma of abandoning a mortgage wanes, the Obama administration could face an uphill battle in its effort to keep people in their homes by pressuring hanks to cut their mortgage payments. Some analysts argue that’s not always the right approach, particularly if it prevents people from shedding onerous debts and starting a fresh. "The effect of these programs is often to lead homeowners to make decisions that are not in their economic best interests," saysBrent White, a law professor at the University ofArizona who has studied mortgage defaults. 1.Why do the two families move out
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