Personally, I pay more in student loans than every one of my parents, aunts, and uncles pay on ybeir mortgage. I pay 2-3 times more in rent than their mortgage. I might be ok but only because of a high paying tech job. Those at the lower end the scale are absolutely fucked.
There was a lot of misguided misdirection in trying to sell every US citizen on home ownership, but there was also a tinge of romanticism towards the principle that maybe everyone could have their own small slice of the pie rather than a few fat cats owning the whole thing with all of us begging to borrow a piece.