Data released by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York suggests that the relationship between student loan debt and the housing market has turned ugly fast. People with student debt used to buy homes at higher rates than peers who had not taken out loans, partly because going to college meant earning more money, according to the report.

But in 2012, the New York Fed reported that for the first time in at least a decade, 30-year-old student borrowers were less likely to take out home mortgages than other young people. Among people around 30 years old, homeownership was plunging fastest for student debtors.

Economists are worried. Last month, former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers said that student loan debt was taking the life out of the housing recovery, and the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz called the rising debt “an educational crisis” that is “affecting our potential future growth.”

But if it is a crisis, then it begins long before twentysomethings turn 30 and start to think about white picket fences. From the moment they leave the classroom and enter the real world, young people are often on a delayed schedule, unable to take even baby steps toward real estate maturity.

Eventually, Ms. Cooke moved into a two-bedroom in Manhattan that housed four women, one boyfriend and two dogs, including Ms. Cooke’s cockapoo, Oliver.

“I couldn’t take it,” she said. “They were all in college.”

But she couldn’t move into her own place without saving up some money first, and she couldn’t do that without cutting out one of her two biggest expenses: rent and her recently resumed loan payments. This time, she chose to keep up the loan payments.

She moved out, and for two months, slept on friends’ couches and air mattresses in divided bedrooms and spare nooks. Oliver, the dog, was not always welcome where Ms. Cooke was, so he had his own itinerary of abrupt relocations. She shed any remnants of an REM cycle at her sixth pit stop. “I was basically sharing a living room with a guy who snored and talked in his sleep,” she said.