Passing through Los Angeles this morning, I bought a copy of the Orange County Register. On Page One was a huge promo to this story (reg req), which took up three inside pages.

The feature article, entitled “Real estate brought riches,” tells of an immigrant family that bought a house about 13 years ago, sold it last fall for triple the purchase price and moved to Arizona with the profits to live the good life.

The family’s tale, the Register said, was also “a story of wealth creation played out countless times across a county where the local median home price doubled in a mere four years to more than half-a-million bucks.”

The piece disturbs me. It invites readers of modest means to throw everything into real estate and take enormous financial risks.

Maybe this is good advice. After all, California real estate has been appreciating for a long time, and in the past few years southern California prices have been absolutely soaring.

But maybe there’s a housing bubble, as more and more experts worry. (I strongly believe there is a dangerous bubble in much of California.) Maybe the people who take this kind of burden on today — at a time when a smaller percentage of households can afford a median-price home than ever and lenders are offering dangerously leveraged deals — are going to lose everything.

There’s one small cautionary element to the Register’s story. It describes how the owners started borrowing against the appreciated value of the house and how that led to a worryingly higher debt load. The solution was to cash out and move to Arizona. Bingo, the lottery. Time to celebrate.

If we are in is a bubble, or even if there’s a moderate correction, the newbies in this particular lottery are going to get absolutely screwed. This market may be a sucker’s bet. Even a hint of that in the Register story would have been the responsible thing to do.