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In the summer of 1988, my father took me up to look at the remains of our home, the dream house that he'd built. It was my first time since our family left four years earlier. Political and obscene graffiti covered the half-torn walls. There was no ceiling and surprisingly no floor: the parquet, the stone, the marble, all looted.

When I was nine years old, my family lost our home, and the six of us moved into my grandparents' converted garage.

It was like 'Risky Business' for 10 years. My parents were out of town, they left me a bunch of money, the car, and the house, and I didn't know when they were coming home.

We slept in the park before we had a house, and eventually we shared a home - my parents, my grandparents and five uncles, my family, all of us - on White Oaks Street by Magnolia Street near the railroad. Those were hard times, but I loved living there.

I moved to Los Angeles when I was 20 years old and was absolutely terrified. I grew up in a small town, so the city itself scared me. I initially did not plan on staying but fell in love with it and never went home.

Family life was wonderful. The streets were bleak. The playgrounds were bleak. But home was always warm. My mother and father had a great relationship. I always felt 'safe' there.

I was born on the other side of the tracks, in public housing in Brooklyn, New York. My dad never made more than $20,000 a year, and I grew up in a family that lost health insurance. So I was scarred at a young age with understanding what it was like to watch my parents lose access to the American dream.

These days the American dream of home ownership has turned into a nightmare for millions of families. They wake every day to the reality of a horrible decline in the value of the home that has meant so much to them.

As a teenager, my father took me to the shows at the Architectural Association and to places like Milton Keynes back when it was first being built. But I couldn't find anything for me. There seemed to be despair at the possibility of the built environment possessing any imagination in the real world.