st stop, a walking tour of a destroyed neighborhood. A memorial service later was punctuating a day of remembrance and toil as authorities pressed on with the tasks of poking through wreckage and identifying the dead. Obama returned Saturday from a six-day European tour of Ireland, Britain, France and Poland. After days of focusing on the U.S. relationship with the rest of the world, he turned to an even more critical connection: his own, with the American people.  He was visiting survivors and the bereaved from the worst tornado in decades, in what has racked up to be the deadliest tornado season in more than 50 years. As Air Force One swept over the landscape, flattened houses and stripped trees offered a massive swath of brown. Looking around the neighborhood by foot, Obama eyed boarded-up windows, damaged business signs, fallen trees, piles of debris and homes spray-painted with "God Bless Everyone"  With dozens still missing, homes marked with an X meant they had been searched already for missing loved ones.  Speaking to the press after his tour, Obama said the "scene speaks for itself." He pledged that the tragedy isn't just one for the community, but one the nation will share. "And there will be a national response," he said.  Sunday's task year peak in March. By contrast, permits for single-family home are on pace for their lowest annual level on records dating to 1960. — The number of completed apartments averaged about 250,000 a year before the boom. They fell to 54,000 last year and will probably number around the same this year. But then the number will likely double to about 100,000 in 2012 and hit 250,000 by 2013 or 2014, according to the CoStar Group, a research firm. The lag is due to the time it takes for an apartment building to be completed: an average of 14 months. — Demand is driving up rents. The median price of advertised rents rose 4.1 percent between the end of 2009 and the end of 2010, census data shows. Few expect the higher prices to stem the flood of renters, though. One reason: Younger adults don't value homeownership as earlier generations did and many prefer to rent, studies show. — Rental housing is giving builders more work just as construction of single-family homes has dried up. Still, that economic lift won't make up for all the single-family houses not being built. Apartments account for only about one-fourth of homes. And renters are outspent roughly 2-to-1 by homeowners, who pay for items from lawn care to remodeling and help drive the economy. Before the housing bust, mortgage rates were so low it was often cheaper to buy than rent. That was true a decade ago in more than half the 54 biggest metro areas, according to Moody's Analytics. Today, by contrast, it's cheaper to rent in about 72 percent of metro areas. Consider Mason Hamilton, 26, an energy consultant who rents an apartment with his wife for $1,100 a month in Alexandria, Va., outside Washington. He'd like something bigger. But he says he doesn't plan to buy even though he could afford to. "My parents always told me, 'You need to buy a place; you need to buy property,'" he says. "But the housing market is insane." Many younger Americans see owning as risky. It hardly seems the best way to build wealth, especially when prices are falling. "There's been this idea for years, a part of the American dream, that owning a home improves and strengthens communities," said John McIlwain, a senior fellow at the nonprofit Urban Land Institute. "But what we've learned over the past few years is that many people simply are not re