"A recent article by New York Times journalist Neil Irwin finds that the housing market is still operating as a drag on the economy. While a few markets like New York City and San Francisco are booming and perhaps even reaching the “bubble” stage, most are not. One reason for this is the lower rate of household formation. “The number of households rose by an average of 569,000 a year from 2007 to 2013, according to census data, down from 1.35 million a year from 2001 to 2006.” When children leave their parents’ residence and move into an apartment or a newly purchased home, an additional household is created. If an adult child moves out of his or her own dwelling into someone else’s, a household is destroyed. Since the start of the Great Recession, children have become much more likely to either remain at home or move back. This is because young people, roughly between the ages of twenty and thirty-five, are suffering higher rates of unemployment than in the past, along with lower wages and less secure job tenure. They don’t see futures as bright as did previous generations. And as John Maynard Keynes taught us, pessimistic expectations about the future lead to lower expenditures on capital goods, and by extension big ticket consumer items like new homes." . . .