I've got a Mac that I can run either the Leopard (10.5) or Snow Leopard (10.6) version of OS X on. I'm using it to do web development/testing before publishing files to my production host. 

On the production host my site's doc root is under the home directory (e.g. /home/stimulatingpixels/public\_html) and I'd like to duplicate that location on the Mac. Unfortunately, their is a hidden and lock placeholder on the Mac that looks like a mounted drive with nothing in it sitting in the /home location. 

I know from experience that it's unwise to move this and drop in your own /home directory because upgrades can cause it to be erased (and it doesn't get stored in the TimeMachine backup, by the way). 

So, the question, is there anyway to safely use /home on a Mac either Leopard or Snow Leopard?

(Note: I realize this is very Mac specific and will be asking it in an Apple forum as well. Just wanted to ask here in addition to cover all the bases.)

Update: To help describe why I want to do this, in addition to the front end web site, I've got a series of scripts that I'd like to run as well. One of the main goals with being able to use the /home directory (and more specifically the same path from the servers root) is so that can use the same output paths on the development mac as well be used on the production server. I know there are ways to work around this, but I'd rather not have to deal with it. The real goal is to have all the files on the development Mac have the same filepath from the / root of the directory tree as the production server. 

Another Update: The other reason that I forgot to mention earlier for this is setting up .htaccess paths when using basic authentication. Since those paths are from the file system root instead of the website docroot, they end up going through "/home" when that's part of the tree.