We like to find people to blame for our problems, don't we? And today, a lot of us are busy looking for people to blame for the mortgage meltdown the country is currently suffering through.

You know all about the meltdown: Housing foreclosures are soaring. Owners are walking away from their homes, giving up hope of paying their mortgage bills. Homes are worth less than what people paid for them. You can't open the newspaper without reading about this bad news.

So we look for people to blame. People were greedy, and bought homes that were too expensive for them. Mortgage lenders were lazy, and passed out home loans to people who clearly couldn't pay them back. Real estate agents didn't do enough to deter their clients from buying homes that were obviously out of their financial ability. And real estate appraisers overvalued homes.

Now it's fallen apart.

But here's where some of the real blame lies: Our insistence that owning a house is the American Dream, and that renting is only an option for people who can't afford to get into homes.

The truth is, there are plenty of people out there who should be renting instead of owning. There are plenty of people who can't handle the financial burden of making monthly mortgage payments.

But instead of promoting renting as a viable alternative, we have an entire industry, the real estate industry, basically saying that anyone who rents is doing so because he or she has no other choice or hasn't yet figured out that owning is a far better option.

The government, too, is complicit in this. During the Clinton and Bush administrations, the homeownership rate in the country soared past 70 percent. That's way too high, and it sucked in families and people who had no business financially to own a home.

One way to avoid another housing meltdown is for both the federal government and the real estate industry to stop pushing the idea that renting is, in essence, for losers who can't get into their own homes.