American home-ownership rises

DURING THE PANDEMIC America’s housing market has behaved oddly. Prices have increased rapidly, even as the economy fell off a cliff, defying predictions. In contrast with the last recession, few people have defaulted on their mortgages. A less-noticed trend is that the home-ownership rate has jumped (see chart). Part of the apparent increase, especially the enormous rise in the second quarter of 2020, is a statistical mirage: the pandemic made it hard to collect data, meaning that home-owners were oversampled in the surveys. Yet there is little doubt that a genuine surge in home-ownership is under way.