the recession wasn't that bad........it was the fucked up recovery that hurt us.......
First, people have to have the confidence that the job they have today is the job they'll have tomorrow. When consumer confidence is down, employment confidence goes with it, and people are less likely to buy a new home.
On top of that, people who were financially damaged in the recession are also likely to have had their credit damaged (or completely ruined). Since lending has changed, and those with less-than-stellar credit will find it difficult to obtain a purchase money mortgage, fewer people are able to purchase new homes.
And banks are still not out of the woods. The foreclosure rate has fallen as banks make their way through the mire they themselves created, but it's not over. Banks are still trying to unload houses they foreclosed on, and sometimes they're taking losses on properties, selling them for pennies on the dollar (or in a case just recently handled by one of my associate attorneys, losing money on the sale of a property just to get rid of it (the bank actually had to pay over $2K to complete the sale of the property).
Something else to consider is that no matter where interest rates have gone, spending hasn't really responded overly much. With the Federal Reserve (remember them, they'll come into play, here) keeping interest rates low, the expectation was that spending would go up. But since credit became harder to obtain in the "perfect wake," the expected rise didn't happen. And the Fed has done what it can, even when Republicans accused it of "debasing the dollar" in their efforts to stimulate recovery.
The Obama stimulus, at the beginning, really did help. It certainly helped to weaken the impact of the recovery slump, but Republicans have fought tooth and nail against recovery, reversing the gains we had at the beginning of the Obama stimulus and leaving us with federal spending that's lower than when President Obama took office.
Yes, this recovery is slower than the others; the recession was so deep, impacting every possible sector that could lead to financial chaos, and leaving behind a new kind of chaos that has dragged recovery out over years.
But nonetheless, it's still a recovery that, given how bad things were and how bad the aftermath was and still is and taking the Republican legislative obstructionism into account, it's surprising it isn't slower.