The nation's homeownership rate has sunk to its 1998 levels and some housing experts say it would decline to the level of the 1980s or even earlier, according to a front-page article to today's edition of The New York Times by David Streitfeld.

"Housing is locked in a downward spiral, analysts say, not only because so many people are blocked from the market - being unemployed, in foreclosure or trapped in homes that are worth less than the mortgage - but because even those who are solvent are opting out," the article said.

"The desire to own you own home, long a bedrock of the American Dream, is fast becoming a casualty of the worst housing downtown since the Great Depression," the article continued, adding that "even as the economy began to fitfully recover I the last year, the percentage of homeowners dropped sharply, to 66.4 percent, from a peak of 69.2 percent in 2004."

The housing market signaled further trouble Friday when the National Association of Realtors released its April index of pending deals. Analysts had predicted the index, which anticipates sales that will be complete in the next two months, would be down 1 percent from March, but, the article said, instead it plunged 11.6 percent.

"Buyers are staying away despite the lowest interest rates and the highest affordability levels in many years, which in turn prompts others to hesitate," the article said.

"In a recent paper," the article continued, "a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas city found that the notion that homeownership builds more wealth than investing was true only about half the time. 'For many households in many years, renting and investing the saved cash flow has built more wealth than homeownership,' the economist, Jordan Rappaport, concluded."

Jeffrey I. Friedman, the chief executive of Associated Estates Realty Corporation, which owns 13,000 apartments in Georgia, Indiana, Michigan and other Midwest and Southeastern states, said "we have more of what we call 'renters by choice' than I've seen in the forty years I've been in the business," the article said.

During the housing boom as many as a quarter of those moving on said they were buying a house, but in 2009 the percentage of new owners fell in the first quarter of 13.7 percent, the lowest ever for the company, the article said, adding that as the economy improved last year the number rebounded but this year it fell back again to 14 percent.

Construction of multi-unit buildings is p 21 percent so far this year compared with 2010 while single-family homes are down 22 percent and sales of new single-family homes are lower than at any time since the data was first kept in 1963, the article said.