Is home construction bottoming?
Housing starts fell by 5.9 percent in February.
Housing starts fell by 5.9 percent in February.
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Donald Marron
This morning the Census Department released its latest look at housing activity. The headlines are that housing starts fell by 5.9% in February, mostly because of weakness in the Northeast and the South (which may well reflect February’s terrible weather). Most of the decline was in multi-family; single-family starts were essentially unchanged.
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Donald B. Marron is director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. He previously served as a member of the President's Council of Economic Advisers and as acting director of the Congressional Budget Office.
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Although starts and permits usually grab the headlines, I think it’s also useful to look at another measure of housing activity: the number of houses under construction (see above).
Not surprisingly, the chart shows that the number of single-family homes under construction fell off a cliff in early 2006. Almost 1 million new single family homes were under construction in February 2006. Today there are just 300,000.
The precipitous decline ended last summer, and housing construction has been essentially flat for several months. Perhaps housing construction has finally found bottom?
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