WASHINGTON – June is National Homeownership Month and America is the only nation in the history of the world where 70 percent of the adult citizens can lift a glass and say, “I’ll drink to that!”

As a time-honored cause for celebration, homeownership has been particularly heady in the last few years with much better than average appreciation. In affluent urban centers like Washington and San Francisco, where close-in vacant lots are a rarity, housing in some areas has appreciated 100 percent or more over the last three years.

In many hot-selling areas, entrepreneurial Americans have abandoned the stock market to purchase second and third homes as rapid pay-off investments.

It wasn’t always thus. Once, homeownership was available only to wealthy Americans who could afford huge down payments. Home mortgage lenders in the first part of the 20th century all too often looked at low-income applicants as people problems rather than people with problems.

As a result homeownership in the United States held steady at just over 40 percent from 1900 through most of the 1930s. After World War II, it rose to slightly more than 50 percent as swarms of returning veterans took advantage of the G.I. Bill.

But it didn’t take-off for its present stratospheric-levels until 1968 when Congress passed legislation creating the Federal National Mortgage Association, or Fannie Mae, the first of the huge federally chartered, secondary mortgage makers. The second, the Federal Home Mortgage Association, or Freddie Mac, followed in 1970 and suddenly the old saying “Katy, bar the door” became “Katy, open the door.”

Fannie and Freddie, as secondary mortgage makers, keep a ready flow of cash available for primary home lenders such as banks and savings and loan associations by buying up new mortgages, packaging them and selling them to investors such as pension funds and governments. Money from those sales then can be plowed back into the housing market.

The two multi-billion dollar corporations, both listed on the New York Stock Exchange, have created numerous programs that make getting a home loan less expensive and easier, including the most popular ever – the 30-year, low-down-payment, fixed-rate and pre-payable mortgage.

The returns from owning one’s home are super-size compared with other investments. Both Fannie and Freddie continue to develop new programs, add new technologies and join with new community partners to make homeownership more accessible and more affordable.

By constraining the effect of interest-rate volatility on homeowners, the fixed-rate mortgage is particularly beneficial to a highly mobile nation like the United States, where an astounding 16.1 percent of Americans change their home address each year. That compares with just 7.2 percent among the nations of the European Union, where adjustable-rate mortgages are more common.

Most Americans, of course, regard moving as a “real hassle,” but it is a hassle that, when you think about it, provides a major stimulus for the entire economy.

Congress, amid concerns about accounting irregularities and fears that the two mortgage giants may have overextended their own mortgage portfolios – now valued at $1.5 trillion – is considering sweeping reform legislation that includes an independent regulator with heightened power, stricter accounting procedures and decreasing the size of their portfolios.

That’s all too the good, but Congress must put a choke leash on some of Fannie and Freddie’s more zealous critics. Any reform legislation that ends up on the president’s desk for signature must avoid handicapping the two corporations in the successful performance of their major role – helping more families achieve the American dream of homeownership.

For America, homeownership builds a solid and expanding base of good citizens. Homeownership reduces crime, lifts people out of poverty and actually helps cure depression. Higher percentages of homeowners vote, serve on juries and participate as volunteers.

It is, indeed, the very fabric that holds our nation together.

As we enter National Homeownership Month, it’s a good time to think about the storms our nation has weathered in the past, the ones it is currently plowing through and the ones it will be forced to deal with in the future. Then raise a glass in a salute and recall the words of the 19th century British playwright John Howard Payne: “Mid pleasures and palaces though I may roam; be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home.”