This morning the Census Bureau reported housing starts for December 2008. The number, 550,000 units, was considerably worse than the already expected number. Which means we have passed a milestone. We are now officially in the worst housing slump since the Great Depression.
Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote a diary entitle, The worst housing slump since the Great Depression? which noted that, at that point, the housing decline was on par with the worst since World War 2, and was likely to worsen.
Here's the data I cited:
In December 2007, an annual rate of 604,000 new single family houses were started. This is a dramatic decline of (-56.5%) from the all time high of 1,389,000 annual rate of starts only 17 months ago in July 2005.
Recent comments