Of course, that's not what we want to hear right now. We were hoping, and economists in and out of the housing industry had been promising, that the downturn would be an upturn well before now. Those same economists are now asking us to be patient, and most aren't eager to venture a guess about recovery.
The "American Dream" continues to be a nightmare of late or delinquent mortgage payments or foreclosure for millions of homeowners. Yet the idea of homeownership so permeates the American consciousness that even people who have lost their homes say they want to try it again when times are better.
No kidding! At a Philadelphia Fed meeting a year ago, a study presented by Fannie Mae found that most people preferred owning to renting - even those delinquent on their mortgages or whose houses were worth less than their loans on them.
"The nonfinancial issues eclipse the financial ones," Fannie Mae chief economist Douglas Duncan said. "They say owning a house makes more sense than renting one, even if they are in trouble."
The builders group's survey of 2,000 "likely 2012 voters" was conducted in May of this year by Public Opinion Strategies of Alexandria, Va., and Lake Research Partners of Washington.
Celinda Lake, president of Lake Research, said the results showed that Americans considered owning a home not a commodity, but a "core value."
That's a good thing, because this commodity has lost considerable value in the last decade. Americans' equity in their homes has fallen from 61 percent in 2001 to 38 percent in the first quarter of this year, the Fed says. And exactly 22.7 percent of borrowers owe more than their houses are worth, recent data from CoreLogic show.
