Half-facetiously, what about people who bought at (comparatively) low sticker prices _and_ low interest rates? If you had bought a house in (say) Austin 10 years ago, you would have gotten about a 3-4% rate, and the value of your house on the market today would be almost double what it was then.
It's easy to find individual markets (or time periods) where people have been lucky with overperforming house prices. I'm more concerned right now with what the future looks like for the median case.
Home ownership is still probably a decent deal overall (I bought two years ago). But home ownership was an incredible deal for boomers who have been able to refinance at progressively lower rates while seeing a disproportionate rise in home value.
Millennials now are stuck buying those homes with highly-inflated prices with not nearly as rosy a probable future. While it's certainly possible that housing prices continue to rise drastically, my own read of the available information shows that this was chiefly a side-effect of declining interest rates, which frankly can't get that much lower.
Nominal interest rate (which is the rate quoted on your loan) cannot go negative. So your actual amortized payments for acquiring a home will never be subsidized by a "negative" mortgage APR.
For a consumer to borrow funds the nominal rate is negative? Where have you seen this? I'd like to see a citation.
The reason this rate cannot be negative is that demand will immediately fill it up and use it for arbitrage (shove the money under a mattress and pay back the loan later) before it can become negative.
