(FORTUNE Magazine) – After a rewarding love affair with homeownership in the Seventies and Eighties, some people feel they've been jilted in the Nineties. Those who bought at the top in California and the Northeast suffered bigtime losses as prices tumbled. Even between the coasts, values dipped in spots because of recession. But the world still favors the American dream -- housing remains a good investment. Not everywhere at every time. But in most places, most of the time. An analysis by the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University shows that if you bought a house in 1983 and sold it in 1991, you would have enjoyed real annual growth in equity of 4% to 22% in ten of 12 markets studied. The big exception was Houston, where homeowners lost 17% a year owing to the oil-price collapse of the mid-1980s. Boston was a loser after 1987, down 2.5% annually. That's the past, you say, when appreciation generally kept up with or beat inflation. Fact is, even if the value of a home lags behind inflation by a percentage point or two, leverage makes the equation work for most people: If you put $20,000 down on a $100,000 house and the price rises 3%, that $3,000 capital gain translates into a 15% return on investment. It's really more complicated because of such items as tax benefits and maintenance and selling costs for the homeowner, and returns a renter could earn if he invested the down-payment money. After taking all kinds of subtleties into account, the number crunching still favors buying. Real estate expert Anthony Downs of the Brookings Institution shows that a homeowner's return on investment in the 1980s was high even in the Midwest, where houses appreciated just 3.6% a year vs. inflation of 4.6%. A buy-vs.- rent study of individual homes by Merrill Lynch finds that if appreciation lags behind inflation by two percentage points, you still won't lose by buying. Says economist Karl Case of Wellesley College, who closely follows housing prices and investment decisions, ''Housing almost always gives you a very good return.'' Some seers believe that real home prices will collapse in coming years as the population becomes older, but that's all wrong, says a new study out of the University of Southern California. Professor Dowell Myers argues that as Americans age, they increase their homeownership rate and they spend more on housing until around age 70. Hence baby-boomers, who range from 28 to 47, will keep adding to demand and shoring up prices for a long time.