The common man saw a massive benefit from TARP, and all the other programs. Had the government & Fed not intervened, the common man would have seen his housing value vaporized. Mortgage rates would have - properly - skyrocketed to record highs, making it extraordinarily expensive to refinance a home or buy a new home. Such high mortgage rates would have crushed housing values even further, and it's unlikely there would have been any value recovery to this day. The common man would have lost trillions.

The common man rents. The better off common man buys a house in a market with now reinflated prices. If you're a buyer, low prices are better than lower interest rates.

The winners were the narrower subset of Americans who skewed older and wealthier (enough to have already owned a home).

The common man does not rent in America. The home ownership rate is 65%. The common man owns a house, or lives in a family that does.

"The homeownership rate is computed by dividing the number of owner-occupied housing units by the number of occupied housing units or households."

http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/meta/long_HSG445212.htm

So you're counting a 26 year old millennial living with their parents as a homeowner?

No, and neither is the 65% home ownership rate.

So, let's say we add an additional 26 year old millennial to every household that's owner occupied (that 65% rate you cite).

Does the home ownership rate go down, along with that absolute and percentage increase in the number of people who don't own a home?

That scenario is a fake one, it doesn't exist in reality, and it's a straw-man. Nowhere on earth, at any point in time, has it been common for a 24 or 26 year old to own a home.

Among 30-34 year olds, the home ownership rate is above 50%. Among 25-29 year olds, it's still 37%, which is substantial.

The stats say the vast majority of sub 30 adults are renting, not living at home with their parents. That group is the only majority renter group and has been for decades.

208 million people in the US live in a home that is owner occupied, and that represents 79.5 million homes. Those 79.5 million homes have a mere 2.6 people per home. It's blatantly obvious the 'common man' owns a home.

74 million of the US population are non-adults and can't qualify for home ownership typically. That leaves 240 million people.

Just the fact that there are nearly 80 million homes that are owner occupied, proves my point. You can't have 80 million owner occupied homes, and pretend it's the minority, when the total sum of all households in the US is 123 million.

There are 43 million households that are renter occupied, representing 104 million people. By definition these people are the uncommon, the minority.

You throw out a bunch of numbers, but again, you're making the mistake of counting the number of houses that are owner-occupied, not the number of people who own houses.

And it's worth pointing out one of your subconscious biases at work here. You say: "Nowhere on earth, at any point in time, has it been common for a 24 or 26 year old to own a home." And sure, that's true. But they comprise just as much a part of the common man as a 35 year old white man. Just because someone is young doesn't mean you can write them off as "oh they don't count as a typical American!"

14% of people 24-34 live at home with their parents. That's a substantial number. If there are 50 million people in that age group (a guesstimate), that means you're deciding to count 7 million people--a number that is increasing faster than the rate of population growth--as living in owner-occupied housing, when that's misleading as to their actual economic status. And there are similar setups--cousins living with family members, friends living with friends--who aren't counted either. And, given the socioeconomic makeup of most Hacker News readers, I'm guessing the typical reader doesn't have much exposure to demographics where this is a big trend.

No; that doesn't factor into it at all. The home ownership rate is the percentage of occupied houses that are occupied by their owner, rather than being rented. It isn't affected at all by the number of people under each roof.

Which is exactly the point: the home ownership rate does not, contrary to its name, give a real description of what proportion of people own homes. It describes the proportion of homes that are owner-occupied, which is an entirely different thing.

And if what we're trying to do is figure out what the common man (whatever that is) rents or owns, it's a terrible and misleading measure to use.

The 65% home ownership rate includes a lot of people who recently bought a house that was much more expensive because of housing policy deliberately designed to increase the price of homes. It seems a stretch to claim they benefited from it.