For generations, single family housing development was a driver of US economic growth. Today, there is no single family housing industry to speak of. These 7 charts derived from this week’s release of new house sales data from the Census Bureau illustrates just how bad things are.

New house sales fell versus September 2015 and remain barely above the housing depression lows, a mere fraction of 2005 bubble levels.  .

This recovery has not even reached the levels reached at the bottom of the 1992 or 1974 recessions. It has gotten back to the 1982 recession low, but there are 45 million more households today than in 1982.

The number of full time jobs has returned to 2007 levels. Normally new house sales and jobs growth correlates somewhat. But while the number of jobs continued to grow since 2013, new home sales haven’t kept pace. That’s because most of the jobs being created are too low paying and too insecure to support the purchase of a home. Because of ZIRP, corporate executives find it more profitable to fund stock buybacks or buy competing companies and fire workers, than to invest in their workforces.

Homebuilders tell survey takers that business is great, but the facts say otherwise. The gap between what builders say and the actual level of sales is a measure of the uselessness of the survey. The NAHB survey is ruined by recency bias and survivorship bias. There are fewer builders dividing a smaller pie today than the housing bubble days. To the surviving builders, who mostly now build only high priced luxury housing, business looks good. 

While sales are terrible, price inflation rages. Economists don’t call it inflation becauses houses don’t count in inflation measures used by economists and the Fed, like the CPI and PCE Inflation measure favored by the Fed. Houses are considered assets, and economists and policy makers narrow the definition of “inflation” to exclude asset prices, particularly house prices.  So the 13.5% year to year increase in new house prices is “appreciation,” not inflation.