Home buyers and owners refinancing mortgages are increasingly finding at the closings that their lender isn’t honoring the deal they thought they had locked up.Throw in the record levels of foreclosures.

Colorado’s General Assembly this year passed 60 pages of laws regarding mortgage regulations, going from the least-regulated state in the country to one that is being used as a model nationwide.

As many as 100,000 people in the lending industry nationwide have lost their jobs in recent weeks because of the meltdown in the subprime market.

The past 120 days in the mortgage-lending arena have been unprecedented in both the number of company closings and illiquidity in the market.I will attempt to explain the current situation by a brief economic history coupled with a compilation of facts.

First, the 1990s proved to be a time of fairly stable long-term interest rates in the mortgage lending business. Following this, there came a period when Washington, D.C., began to promote the idea of homeownership for everyone. This promotion was directed from the White House as well as Congress. In response to this new challenge, Realtors, home builders and mortgage lenders alike looked to the secondary markets to assist with supplying the ever-increasing capital demand for housing.

Q: I live in an older building and my apartment doesn’t have enough electrical outlets. Isn’t the owner required to add more or update the system?

A: Depends on the condition of the system. A property owner is normally required to keep a place “fit and habitable,” which is usually defined by state law and sometimes honed by county, city, village or town laws. “Habitable” means that the rental unit is fit for occupation or “suitable to be lived in.” Unfortunately, what’s considered “suitable” for some dwellers may not suit other folks at all.

Countrywide Financial Corp. grew from a two-man startup in 1969 to become the nation’s leading mortgage lender by deftly riding out housing boom-and-bust cycles. This time around, however, the ride has been a lot rougher, leaving the company in a scramble to regain its footing as the housing market has turned from boom to bust.

To survive, it’s been forced to borrow billions of dollars, announce thousands of job cuts and dramatically restructure its lending practices to nearly eliminate risky subprime loans to borrowers with shaky credit that have led to massive foreclosures and defaults wracking the housing market.