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The difference with housing bubbles that nobody really wants to address is the geographic factor.

When the dot.com bust came, everyone who was in that market was affected more or less the same (obviously the degrees were different, but the techs lost money across the board) as we were all buying from the same market. However, with real estate, a bubble in one part of the country won't necessarily have any effect on other areas of the country, because we are buying from different markets.

Additionally, a person who bought a house say five years ago, may never actually be affected by a housing decline. If they can afford the house and don't plan on selling, it's not really important, they still have the house and in another decade it will still have gone way up. Basically, with real estate, if you can afford to hold onto it, at the end of the day it's still worth something and it is tangible.

However, if you invested all of your money in some dot.com back in 1998 and that company didn't have an actual product, didn't have a business plan that EVER showed a profit, in fact didn't have anything but a website, chances are that by the spring of 2001, that company didn't even exist anymore. Your stock was worth ZERO and it would never be worth anything again. This is what happened in 1999-2000 and this is also what happened in 1929.