Interchange: The United States of Gordon Gekkos?

The current housing crisis in America is a product of greed - by homebuilders, mortgage lenders, and, yes, consumers.

So says Sriram Khé, associate professor of geography at Western Oregon University, who asks if planners could have done more to prevent this greed from crashing the market.

He writes that while consumers are being portrayed as innocent lambs, median home sizes have increased nearly 61 percent since 1970, despite shrinking family sizes.

And because of greed, consumers have fallen for all of the false promises that you really can get something for (almost) nothing.

Signs of the economic downturn are starting to show in the housing market, however - recent stories suggest that the McMansion craze may be slowing, and that these unsustainable homes may in fact become our next slums.

Khé believes that by reigning in the frenzied rate of home building, planning commissions could have better served the public interest by saving consumers from themselves.