Editor’s note: This is the fifth in a six-part series on the housing crisis.

Step 5: Oops, Someone Broke the Economy

Could-a, should-a, would-a.

We could have saved more and spent less; we should have realized that a long-term commute would become untenable. We would have changed things sooner if we had realized that, rather than our joint income continuing to grow, it would hit a wall and suddenly shrink.

Anyone who paid attention to the region over the last decade saw the housing crisis coming. We simply didn’t believe that we were right. We watched as houses suddenly became worth more than $500k. Not mansions but tract homes, the same sort in which I was raised, were now selling for prices well beyond what my husband and I, with our double professional salaries, would consider affordable. For five years, we all asked each other, “Where are these people coming from? How are so many people affording these ridiculous prices?”

As we now know, they weren’t. Or at least many weren’t. So many people were talked into stretching their budgets to meet impossible mortgages. And the house collapsed into a pile of cards. Here’s the problem: when a card house falls, it makes a mess and someone puts the cards back into their deck. This catastrophe was less of a card house and more of a Rube Goldberg nightmare.

When houses with sketchy mortgages fell into foreclosure, everything else fell. Local retail, property taxes, sales taxes, construction and jobs all went poof. We know all too well what happened next — furloughs.

That’s when I found out veterinarians are not recession proof. A disproportionate number of my clients have jobs in real estate, construction or work for the state. As their incomes declined, so did mine. If my clients can’t pay their bills, my paycheck reflects that hole.

Over the past two years, my income has dropped by nearly half. This doesn’t qualify me for any sort of pity prize. We made our choices, some good, some bad and many misguided. In short, we were human. Our fate could belong to anyone.

Christy Corp-Minamiji is a large-animal veterinarian in the region and resides in Northern California.