What if they threw a housing recovery and nobody showed up?

That thesis is not exactly accurate: Millions of people will have purchased homes this year. Perhaps not at breakneck speed, but they are buying. According to the National Association of Realtors, existing home sales jumped 2.4 percent in October to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 5.17 million.

Sales are now at their highest pace of 2014, but still remain 1.7 percent below the 5.26 million-unit level from September a year ago.

NAR maintains that the recovery won't reach its full potential until more builders get with the program. That's not to say builders aren't producing new houses; they are, but not at the number that's needed to satisfy latent demand.

According to the National Association of Home Builders, the nation's hammer-and-saw folks will erect some 990,000 new dwellings this year. That's up from 930,000 last year. But it's a far cry from the 1.4 million or more that are necessary to placate folks looking for a brand-new residence.

"In a normal year, there should be demand for 1.7 million units," Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics, said recently at NAHB's semi-annual construction forecast conference.

Of course, the economy isn't normal, at least not yet. So the "usual" number of enough people aren't visiting model homes and signing contracts. Particularly absent are the 3 to 4 million 18- to 34-year-olds who have yet to form their own households. They are either living with roommates, or in Mom and Dad's basement.

Zillow reports that 32 percent of all adults are now living with someone, up from just 25 percent as recently as 2000. Stagnant wages have been a major contributing factor in this. On average, Zillow found that doubled-up adults earn about 76 percent of the median income of people living on their own.

The percent share of first-time buyers continues to underperform historically. First-timers, according to NAR, have represented less than 30 percent of all buyers in 17 of the past 18 months. That's the lowest level in nearly three decades. Forty percent is the long-term average.

The share of entry-level buyers has been "well below normal" for the past seven years, according to NAR's chief economist, Lawrence Yun, who says builders need to raise their production by 500,000 units "just to open up" the inventory of homes for sale.

"One of the constraining factors is inventory," Yun explains. "First-time buyers tend to buy existing homes that owners vacate when they buy new homes. So builders need to build more so the natural chain reaction can begin. If we had more homes to sell, we'd make more sales."

But builders are an optimistic lot. Setting the 2000-2003 period as a benchmark for normal housing activity, when single-family production averaged 1.3 million units annually, NAHB economists expect single-family starts to rise steadily, from 48 percent of what is considered a typical market in the third quarter of 2014 to 90 percent of normal by the fourth quarter of 2016.

Put another way, the number of single-family houses built this year will hit 637,000 units, then increase 26 percent next year to 802,000 units, and reach 1.1 million houses in 2016.

That's still short of "normal" demand, but who's pushing it? Certainly not most builders, who were burned -- many into oblivion -- when the economy went south and they were stuck with too many unsold units.

"Single-family builders are feeling good," said NAHB Chief Economist David Crowe. "They are not overly confident, but confident enough to keep moving forward."

Realtors, on the other hand, aren't feeling so good. Even as the use of lockboxes hits a 12-month high, the confidence of NAR's members is at a 12-month low, Yun reported recently.

Yun said he can't decide what's more important: lockboxes or member sentiment. But in a few years, he added, the answer should be moot because a full recovery will have taken place and the housing market should once again be running on all cylinders.

For now, there are 2.3 million existing houses on the market, which is 6 percent more than a year ago, when 2.17 million units had "For Sale" signs in front of them. But it's not enough.

"The rise in doubled-up households is a troubling sign of the times and starkly illustrates one of the prime drivers behind weak sales," said Zillow Chief Economist Stan Humphries.

If there is a silver lining to all this, it's that all of those roommate households "represent tremendous energy for the market," said Humphries, who figures a half-million buyers are waiting in the wings to step into the market as the economy trudges forward.

Credit unions reached a pair of milestones recently, and that's good news for homebuyers.

The nation's 6,557 credit unions passed the 100 million-member mark in June, according to the Credit Union National Association. But more importantly, at least to the housing market, CUs have posted a 10 percent year-over-year increase in mortgage originations as of the first half of 2014.

That means these service-oriented, member-owned cooperatives now have more than an 8 percent share of the home loan market. That's three times what it was prior to the recession.

Granted, purchase-money lending by other institutions is way down, which automatically gives credit unions a larger share. But there's no doubt that while other lenders are losing business, CUs are boosting theirs.

Nearly two-thirds of all credit unions offer mortgages, and those that don't offer them tend to be very small. So some 98 percent of the vast credit union membership is affiliated with institutions in the mortgage business.

Mike Schenk, vice president of economics and research at CUNA, says his members have posted huge membership gains, in part, because they offer financing for new and existing houses.

"Definitely mortgages have played a significant role," Schenk says. "We've seen a very strong increase in originations over the course of the last several years."

Indeed, mortgages currently account for 41 percent of all credit union loans, as opposed to just 25 percent in 2000.

Credit unions are not-for-profit institutions that are controlled by their members. They were first introduced in 1909 to combat the loan sharking and high interest rates that were common at the time among financial institutions serving the working class.

These days, you still have to be a member to borrow money, whether for a house, car or boat. But if you don't have a credit union at work, there's probably one in your local community. Many are either tied to a church or are trade-related -- that is, oriented to an association, organization or union. And most are hardly what you'd call exclusive, meaning that practically anyone can join.

There are several reasons why CUs have gained ground in the mortgage space, not the least of which is that they answer to their members, not a group of outside stockholders demanding a high return on their investments.

"As members, you are the primary focus," says Schenk. "If you have an account, you are an owner and you have a voice in running that institution."

During the financial meltdown, moreover, credit unions refrained from making the toxic, consumer-unfriendly loans that took some lenders to the brink of failure and pushed others over the edge. That's why charge-offs at CUs were only a fourth of what they were for other lenders.

Furthermore, when other lenders hunkered down to weather the recession, credit unions tended to remain fully engaged. And as a result, according to research, consumers trust CUs more than other banking institutions. "People really do realize CUs are acting in their best interest," says the CUNA economist.

Many also realize they can save a bunch of money at their credit union. They usually aren't any cheaper when it comes to interest rates, but CUs tend not to tack on a bunch of superfluous fees that other lenders seem to love.

And because they are local and member-controlled, they are more likely to consider applicants with a story to tell than some underwriter five states over who is forced not to deviate from standard guidelines.

The typical loan amount at credit unions is $130,000, and 70 percent of their loans are the garden variety, plain vanilla, 30-year fixed-rate mortgage. But that doesn't mean they can't be innovative. Several are.

This spring, for example, Mountain American Credit Union, the second-largest in Utah with 488,000 members, was the first mortgage lender in the country to actually close on an electronically signed FHA loan. And earlier this fall, the pioneering CU closed on the first e-signed VA mortgage.

A few more examples:

-- Pentagon Federal, with 1.3 million members nationwide, pioneered a 5/5 adjustable mortgage in which the rate resets every five years to the market rate at that time. Then the Alexandria, Virginia-based institution gave us the 15/15 ARM, which adjusts only once, at the midterm mark.

-- Then there was the five-year fixed-rate mortgage from the 41,000-member National Institutes of Health Federal CU. Dubbed the "see ya" loan, it was basically a refinance product so owners could time a special event -- retirement, for example, or when the kids start college -- to the end of their mortgage payments.

Bottom line: If you've overlooked credit unions as a source of financing, look around. Join one and see what it has to offer.

Education comes at a price, and not just the cost of the degree itself. We're talking about the inability to take advantage of today's low mortgage rates and stable prices.

Student loans are now cited most often by young buyers as the main expense that prevents them from saving for a down payment. Nothing new there, perhaps. But a new report from a well-recognized real estate consulting firm is the first to quantify the impact.

According to John Burns Real Estate Consulting, some 414,000 new home transactions will be lost this year because of student debt. At the average price of $200,000 per house, that translates to about $83 billion in lost business.

Burns analysts Rick Palacios Jr. and Ali Wolf say that in a typical year, about 8 percent of people aged 20-39 would normally buy a house. But many are weighed down by their student loans. Every $250 per month in student debt reduces young buyers' purchasing power by $44,000, the 30-page report maintains. And of the 16 million people in the first-time buyer cohort, 5.9 million -- 35 percent -- pay more than $250 a month on their school loans.

Indeed, 5.9 million heads-of-household under the age of 40 now pay more than $250 a month in student loans, the Burns company study found. Large monthly payments like this can easily push would-be borrowers over the 43 percent debt-to-income ratio cutoff set by most lenders.

Here's another way to look at the issue: Assuming a median first-time buyer income of $61,000 and a maximum mortgage for the typical first-timer, you'd be able to qualify for a loan of up to $234,000 as long as you carried no extra debt.

But if you have student loans and pay $250 on them per month, your maximum mortgage would be cut to $190,500. If your monthly school debt payment was $500, you'd be able to borrow only $147,000.

Since 2005, the amount of student loan debt has swelled, now exceeding $1.1 trillion, the report points out. That's up from $241 bllion in 2013. And the average balance has nearly doubled during that period, from $10,650 to $21,000.

Historically, better-educated, higher-earning consumers were more likely to become owners by the time they reached 30. But that trend reversed itself in 2012 and continues today. Now, it's 30-year-olds with no history of student debt who are more likely to become owners.

Some 45 percent of all 25-year-olds have some student debt. But that's not the only thing that's holding them back.

Another report, this one from the National Association of Home Builders, says 83 percent of builders polled in August lost sales over the previous six months because their buyers could not qualify for financing.

Of course, contracts can fall through for any number of reasons. But well over half of the builders said lending standards were tight -- too tight for many first-timers to make the grade.

"If 83 percent of the builders lost 9.7 percent of their sales," said NAHB economist Paul Emrath, "that works out to an estimated 18,700 new home sales lost because buyers were unable to qualify."

Said NAHB Chairman Kevin Kelly, a builder from Wilmington, Delaware: "NAHB advocates for prudent lending standards, but we've seen banks and regulators swing the pendulum too far and create an environment where lending standards are too restrictive."

Getting back to higher education. While we understand the value of a degree, the question, at least to the Citizens Financial Group of Providence, Rhode Island, is: Is it worth the price?

Certainly, college grads earn more than those who only completed high school -- perhaps twice as much over their working years. But a study by Citizens Financial found that many grads don't believe going to college was worth the cost.

Indeed, more than three quarters wish they had planned better in paying down their student loans. And while nearly two-thirds of the former students agreed that "going to college enabled me to do great things in my life," a whopping 47 percent said they may not have chosen college at all had they known the impact college debt would have on their lives.

"Despite the well-documented, long-term value of a college degree," commented Citizens' Brendan Coughlin, "too many Americans continue to struggle with paying the rapidly increasing cost after they have graduated."