Do most people still want to own their home?

There was a fair amount of criticism at this site last month when I characterized the housing price situation in the Minneapolis area as “a basket case,” based on the Case Shiller survey of housing resale prices in 20 major American cities. Minneapolis was at the bottom of the heap.

The numbers for February are out today from Case Shiller and as much as we might be tempted to put lipstick on a pig, there’s simply no other way to describe Minneapolis’ housing price situation. It’s bad.

The seasonally-adjusted numbers for February show Minneapolis near the bottom again.

There’s something wrong when Cleveland and Detroit lead the nation in housing prices. True, of course, they had nowhere to go but up. But at least they went up.

Minneapolis has now declined for eight consecutive months, still a far cry, though, from the 23 consecutive months of housing value declines that started in 2007.

What’s particularly troubling is the pace of decline. In 2008, the Minneapolis area’s prices declined 19%. But that decline pace slowed to 2.1% in 2009. In 2010, however, it increased to 5.1% and now the year-over-year drop is over 8 percent.

But lower prices usually attract people to the housing market, making owning a home more affordable than a year or two ago. That, however, may be changing.

“A lot of Americans don’t want to own a house; they don’t see it as a good long-term investment and they don’t see it as a better way to live and raise a family,” said David Blitzer of Standard and Poor’s, which runs the survey.

Is that a sea change in the American Dream? “It’s really not quite clear,” he says. “If a year from now, we’re sitting in the same place, we’ll have no choice but to conclude that a lot of people who would’ve bought a house 10 years ago, aren’t interested in it anymore.”

You can find all the data here.