That's not exactly what "home ownership rate" means. Home ownership rate is the proportion of occupied homes which are owned by their occupants. If your town has one hundred occupied homes, then 67 of those occupied homes would be owned (or being paid for on mortgagee) by the people living inside.

Adult children living at home, adults living in homes with roommates, people underwater on their mortgage, etc would all count towards a higher home ownership rate.

Rising housing prices help people underwater on their mortgage get above water.

I wouldn’t call ownership a benefit for the 71% of home owners with a mortgage.

> Zillow’s Negative Equity 2012 Q3 data; we find 29% (20.6 million) of homeowners own their home outright

https://www.zillow.com/research/free-and-clear-american-mort...

At least one Nobel prize-winning economist has noted that home ownership is not all that it's made out to be.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-10-15/the-econo...

Just flip it around, would plummeting housing prices benefit homeowners with a mortgage? No, that's a disaster (see the 2007 housing crash). Borrowing, especially at the extreme low rates, on an appreciating asset is great, paying debt on a depreciating asset is a nightmare.

Flip what around? A mortgage doesn’t give you the benefits of being wealthy. Whether the market is good or bad. Anyway, the point is moot as the parent report shows the top 10% also own 41% of the houses, so the initial argument stands that the wealthy are benefiting the most.