The Examiner, Washington, D.C., December 5, 2007

Even as middle-class living conditions have improved only modestly, the burden of paying for a home has increased dramatically. Over a generation, the average number of rooms in a home increased by 7 percent as average mortgage expenses increased by 69 percent — at a time when other family expenses were falling.

The impact of rising mortgage costs has been huge. The proportion of families who are “house-poor” — that is, who spend more than 35 percent of their incomes on housing — has quadrupled in a single generation.

The major reason middle-class families are willing to shell out so much of their incomes on housing is that “when a family buys a house, it buys much more than shelter from the rain”; more to the point, it “buys a public-school system.”…

Right now, many middle-class parents complacently believe that things are great in their neighborhood public schools … [even though] the quality of public schools in more affluent neighborhoods is not necessarily very high.