Building a new home? Yeah, me neither.
Home construction has hit yet another low. America hasn't built this few new homes in decades.
New homes under construction each month, going back 40 years. Fewer homes are going up now than at any time since the Vietnam War.
Bureau of the Census / www.dmarron.com
Housing starts and permits usually dominate the headlines on residential construction data day. In September, for example, single-family starts increased a healthy 4.4% (total starts increased 0.3%), and single-family permits rose 0.5% (but total permits declined 5.6%).
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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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Those are certainly important measures, but I also like to look at a third measure of residential activity in the report: the number of single-family houses under construction.
That measure suggests that the housing market has continued to deteriorate in recent months:
The number of single-family homes under construction at the end of September fell to just 269,000, down about 14% from a year ago. I had once hoped that the housing market was putting in a bottom, with homes under construction plateauing at about 300,000. But we’ve now witnessed five straight months of declines.
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