Loving your house again

First, let me say this: Of course I have regrets. After all, the purchase of our family home in Hollywood with an adjustable-rate mega-jumbo mortgage closed a mere 119 days before Countrywide Financial Corp. announced that -- whoops! -- it had, uh, run out of money. Of all the financial horror stories of last summer, this was the one that seemed to mark the official start of what is now commonly referred to as the "credit crunch" -- the symptoms of which, if you're an L.A. homeowner at least, include weeping openly in front of CNN real estate bulletins and waking up three or four times during the night to check the tumbling digits next to the satellite image of your home on Zillow.com.

So yeah, I have regrets. Like wishing I'd borrowed more money and bought a bigger house.

No, there's no asterisk here, no small print, no catch. And yes, I'm aware that if I tried to sell my house now, I'd probably have to pay the buyer and throw in both my kidneys. Yet, this weekend, as we mark the one-year anniversary of Countrywide's implosion -- and by extension the end of the era when a real estate agent could add half a million dollars to an asking price just by installing a stainless steel refrigerator (sorry, I mean "chef's kitchen") -- it seems appropriate for me to make a rather bold statement: Those of us who purchased nonspeculative property from 2004 to 2007 for the gratuitously self-indulgent purposes of raising a family and investing in our neighborhoods will ultimately have the last laugh.

OK, maybe not the last laugh -- that pleasure is almost certainly reserved for New York hedge fund manager John Paulson, who made a handy 10-digit profit in a matter of months after finding a way to short-sell subprime mortgages.

But if you're a boom-time buyer who can still pay the mortgage (not only do we exist, we're in the majority), you have more than you think to feel happy about. You certainly shouldn't harbor any envy toward the likes of Peter Y. Hong, author of an article in this very newspaper earlier this year with the headline, "How we cashed in before the crash; a Times reporter just couldn't ignore the warning signs" -- which, it has to be said, set a new standard for the sheer quantity of smugness that can be contained within a mere 2,000 words.