As you enter the Slavic Village, an ethnic area in Cleveland in Ohio, nothing really strikes you as odd about this quiet neighbourhood. A few people on the road; the markets not too busy but a strange sense of unease and calm. Some houses better maintained than the others, and some abandoned and in ruins. A cardboard sign catches our eye. It's a house available for 500 dollars. If you call the number scribbled on the board, you would be given the combination of the lock, which you could use to open the house. The property belongs to a real estate speculator who bought it without even seeing it.

It's the story of every third house in Slavic Village, the worst neighbourhood in America when it comes to foreclosures. This area recorded more foreclosure filings than anywhere else in the United States.

Today these vacant homes are only attracting looters and squatters who rip away everything, from the doors and windows to the plumbing and wiring and just about anything that can be sold as scrap. Many houses in Slavic Village have had their siding stripped up to the rooflines and its tiles and flooring ripped apart. Such is the state that the city council now wants a budget of 100 million dollars just to demolish these structures that do nothing for their city or its people.

Slavic Village is in danger of becoming a ghost town, all because a swarm of speculators, real estate agents, mortgage brokers and lenders were greedy, engaged in the worst business practices and wanted to make a quick buck.

The predatory lenders, as the city councilman Anthony Brancatelli so often addresses them as, knew the state's lax regulatory structure. "It gave them a virtually free rein. And thus making possible a cycle of no money, no questions asked lending", he says.

So you had people who had no jobs being offered homes or people living on just social security being sold houses. The funny thing is all the time here we thought the mortgage business was about buyers, sellers and lenders operating under a notion that if you wanted to own a home, you needed a down payment and some semblance of a good credit history.

'Creative' loans were given to people with weak credit and, later, to others with no credit history at all.

It was as if Wall Street brokers came to places such as Slavic Village and said, "Okay, you want money? We'll give you money. We'll give you more money than you dreamed possible."

They did, and predictably, the loans went bad. Borrowers managed to pay the low initial payments but fell into foreclosure when the monthly payments went up.

The sad truth, as the Housing Judge Raymond Pianka says, is that "for many of these buyers, home ownership was simply out of their reach."

Today the crisis affects not just those who have lost their homes, but even those sitting in the four walls of their houses know their single most valuable asset, their home, had plummeted in value. A home they bought with savings and maintained with much love and care.

The sub-prime market was intended to help people realize the American dream of owning a home. Today that dream looks like a nightmare.

(Anubha Bhonsle is on the Jefferson Fellowship. She is observing the US Presidential elections from Arizona, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Washington DC)