Dr. Mike Walden, North Carolina Cooperative Extension economist in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at N.C. State University, responds:

"It has really been mind boggling. And I think this really illustrates how tough things have been for the construction market.
Three years ago builders across the nation were building 2.5 million homes a year. In 2009, they built only .5 million homes -- 500,000.

"And there are two big reasons for this: One, of course, is the recession -- what the recession has done to unemployment; what the recession has done to household incomes. If people don't have a job, they really can't qualify for a mortgage and buy a house. So if people aren't buying homes, builders aren't going to build new homes. So that's from the so-called demand side.

"But there has also been influence from the supply side. In that, all of the foreclosures that have occurred over the last two to three years -- all of those foreclosures -- have resulted in a big increase in the supply of homes available for sale. So, again, if you have a lot of homes sitting on the market because they have been foreclosed on, builders again are not going to build.

"Now the good news is economists think -- most economists think -- the housing market has bottomed out. That is, the worst is over and we are going to begin to see some come back of the housing market.

"But it is going to be modest. We may, for example, this year see housing construction increase somewhere between 5 and 10 percent.
So certainly an upward movement, but nowhere getting us back to where we were those 2.5 million homes being built a year -- nowhere getting back to that anytime soon."