Perhaps the main new reality is that homeownership isn’t as easy to attain as it has been during most of the decades after World War II. For a lot of people, the money isn’t there, because the American economy simply doesn’t offer as many well-paying jobs as it used to. Less fundamentally—and probably easier to change—is the current strictness of lenders, which also slows buying and selling down. It’s only been a decade since loose lending inflated the housing bubble, after all.
