In 2004, newly married and having decided to embark on the next phase of adulthood, my wife and I bought a house. This was back in the delirious days of multiple offers and outlandish escalation clauses, when you had to bring your checkbook with you to an open house, just in case someone else tried to buy the place while you were poking around the attic. I called a mortgage broker somewhere in Florida, and she was thrilled to hear from me, practically breathless. I felt as if I were the 10,000th customer to come through line at the Safeway, my arrival heralded by streamers and sirens and all kinds of free stuff falling from the rafters. Did we want a five-year adjustable-rate loan or maybe even rates adjusted on a monthly basis? Why not just pay just the interest rather than the principal? Did we also need a bridge loan for a few months, to hold us over from one house to the next? How about a ‘‘second trust'' — that is, two mortgages instead of one — so we could put less money down, maybe even as little as 5 percent of the purchase price while avoiding the penalty of private mortgage insurance? We might as well open a home equity line of credit on top of the mortgage, she said, so we could borrow another six-figure sum with the tear of a perforated check. Countrywide, the nation's largest lender, would happily give us that free, and, hey, you never knew when you might decide to add a skylight over the kitchen, or maybe a stone turret.

I didn't spend five minutes thinking about the larger implications of any of this. Like so many other relatively comfortable Americans who were just coming of ownership age, I had nothing against which to judge the situation; this was the only kind of housing market my wife or I had ever known. Nor did I feel compelled to ask any questions when Grace, the terrific nanny we hired to look after our newborn son, bought her own first home some time later. A Filipino immigrant who was on the path to citizenship, Grace was visibly proud to be making the classic American investment in her future, just as we had. Eventually my wife and I added a daughter to the mix, and soon the home we purchased just five years earlier felt stretched and insufficient. ‘‘We do need a bigger house,'' Grace agreed, surveying the battlefield of fallen toys that had once been our living room, and this helped persuade my wife of the same thing. And so we decided to plunge into the housing market once again.

I knew, of course, that the credit climate, even in Washington's relatively stable housing market, had darkened considerably since our last purchase. Still, my wife and I had no debt to speak of and nearly perfect credit scores, and so it was a jolt to find, when I began to call a series of mortgage bankers, that each sounded more dubious about my plans than the last. This time around, I actually was interested in obtaining a bridge loan. But bridge financing, one after another of the bankers dryly informed me, was no longer a realistic option for people like us. Because my wife and I were looking at renovating an older house, we thought we might hold some cash back and secure a second trust instead. ‘‘No one's giving those out anymore,'' one banker told me. ‘‘We just got killed on those.'' I asked about a line of credit, so we could pay for renovations that way. Forget about it, they told me somberly. If I wasn't going to put down more than 20 percent of the home value, no one was going to risk extending my credit.

I could handle the financial ramifications of hearing ‘‘no'' from a bank, but nothing in my experience had prepared me for the succession of emotions that came with it. I will admit to feeling inadequate, even a little embarrassed, in the moments after I put down the phone and pondered these conversations. I imagined myself suddenly as the loan applicant in all those 20th-century movies, the ones where the guy sits in the well of some august, oak-paneled bank and pleads his desperate, not very persuasive case to a granite-faced banker on the other side of the desk. My father had paid off a 30-year mortgage in five years by foregoing carpets and new cars, and yet here I was: the prototypical American consumer of my generation, just another shaky borrower aspiring to live beyond his means. I replayed in my head the exchange with one broker who reluctantly offered that he knew of a small bank in Pennsylvania that might just be persuaded to open the kind of credit line I was seeking — if he personally vouched for me. I felt like an addict looking to score. C'mon, you must know someone who's willing to do this. . . .