Paul Krugman looks at both home and commercial real estate, and notices that they had a virtually identical trajectory.

So the bubble in commercial real estate, where Fannie and Freddie do not lend, and where the Commercial Reinvestment Act held no sway, had just the same sort of bubble.

From my perspective, the CRE bubble is highly significant; it gives the lie both to those who blame Fannie/Freddie/Community Reinvestment for the housing bubble, and those who blame predatory lending. This was a broad-based bubble.

While I agree that the graph shows that government involvement in the US residential real estate market did not produce the crisis, I do think that the bubble was an artifact of excessively lax lending standards and excessively low interest rates, and these were an artifact of government policy, at least if you consider the actions of then Federal Reserve Board, and its Chairman Alan “Bubbles” Greenspan to be government acts.