Home owners tend to be more conservative than renters. Part of it might come from having to write checks to governments to pay for school taxes, sewer taxes, local govt taxes, etc
There is also nothing sacred about a 30-year, fixed-rate, 20% down mortgage, and it is ridiculous to say that anyone who can't afford one of those has no business buying a house. I congratulate anyone who has one, but if you put thousands of dollars into a house that could have gone into higher-yielding investments, you were stupid. You probably can't sell that house now and get that money out of it. If you missed the recent runup in home prices because you were too scared to buy into it with only 10% or 5% down, you were stupid. The only reason to put down big down payments on a house is to reduce the amount you have to borrow. That made little sense when you could borrow at 5 or 6 percent interest to buy a house that was appreciating at 9 percent. There are a lot of very smart people who made out like bandits buying homes with little money down and then selling them a few years later. Many of these homes were fixed up and flipped, which also improved neighborhoods. It's too bad the housing prices have stopped going up so this can't happen in many places anymore, but people who took advantage of easy credit and rising house prices were not greedy bastards, they were smart investors.
Markets can be cruel. What looks like the smartest financial decision today can look bad tomorrow. It's annoying to listen to some of the smugness from all the Monday morning quarterbacks.