Economy
Why We Shouldn't Obsess Over the Falling Homeownership Rate
The economy doesn't need more homeowners right now. It needs more households.
In the midst of the recession, millions of Americans began to "double up," in the language of demographers: Parents moved in with their children, recent college graduates returned home with their parents, unrelated families combined households, while single adults who might otherwise have lived on their own found a room to rent instead.
We seldom describe these people this way, but they essentially dropped out of the housing market, in precisely the same way that would-be workers who give up on finding a job "drop out" of the labor pool.