There may not be anything to be done about the sad state of the home-building industry. They built too many homes before; now they are building very few. But the numbers released on Tuesday are still a stark reminder of the weakness of a large section of the economy.  For the 12 months through April, there were 430,000 single family homes started. That figure is the lowest since the figures were first tallied in 1960, and it is down 75 percent from the peak of 1.7 million, set just five years ago.  In early 2010, there had seemed to be a little bit of a revival. The total for the 12 months ending in October 2009 was 437,100 — until now the lowest ever — but the figure rallied to 503,200 in the 12 months through May 2010. Credit has eased a bit, and there was a little optimism engendered by the temporary tax credit for home buyers.  Now we are back to setting new lows, and tight credit is not the reason. Lack of demand is.  I prefer to look at actual starts over 12-month periods rather than the seasonally adjusted annual rates that the Census Bureau emphasizes in its releases. If you want to compare one month with the next, you need seasonal adjustments, but weather often means you can’t tell what is real and what is not. Looking at 12-month totals means that some noise is eliminated at the expense of a delay in seeing trends.  The picture is not as grim in multifamily starts. There the 12-month totals are slowly rising. They are still low by historical standards, but are well above the recession lows. If fewer people own homes, more may choose to live in apartments. (The annual rate fell in February, leaped in March and fell in April. Those changes are largely related to weather and thus not worth the attention they got.)  The economy overinvested in housing during the bubble. There is no reason to invest a lot in it now. But construction workers can build other things. We underinvested in many types of infrastructure, and now would be an ideal time to use the slack in the construction industry to rectify that.  But of course we will not. Governments are cutting back. It isn’t easy to come up with money to fix schools, or build new ones, when teachers are being laid off.
Home construction is at a new low, and for good reasons. But wouldn't it be nice to put all those unemployed people to work building something we need?