The wikipedia article you linked showed only a decline of 1% home ownership as defined, but mentions a massive decline in "home equity" down to around 34% owning the home outright - this means that people are struggling to own homes in the classical sense of the word "ownership" to me, and the ownership rates are being papered over by long periods of access to cheap loans.
The article isn't about how easy it is to own homes though; it is about whether the real price of homes is changing over time.
Article suggests it is, I'm suggesting that the CPI is an inappropriate index to use and I suspect the trend is - if anything - probably in the other direction. Relative to the money printing that has taken place, the real price of homes appears to have dropped a smidgen which is what we'd expect given technology improvements.
I do agree that houses are probably a lot less affordable. All that debt is expensive. But that has little to do with the real value of the house, it depends on how the financial system is architected.
If the real price of homes is increasing we would expect people to be able to afford them less, per your original comment. I am arguing owning less equity is equivalent to owning less homes in a highly financialized system with cheap credit access. I am not sure about your argument here.
My argument is that the CPI is an inappropriate index to use, it hasn't done a good job of measuring general inflation. My interpretation is that the price of the house is staying about the same (probably slightly down) and real incomes are dropping a bit faster than that (which'd be consistent with real incomes tracking metrics like energy availability per capita & the relative lack of capital investment in the US compared to Asia).
There isn't a particular reason why the real price of houses would go up. A house today is more or less the same good as in 1950, and technology improvements suggest that if anything it is probably easier to build cheap houses today than back then. And on the other hand, the money printing being done is entering into the economy through loans so it probably turns up first in things like house prices. I can imagine scenarios where the real price rose, but the more likely explanation for affordability issues is that real incomes dropped.
