Justin Fox, Columnist

Homebuilding Isn’t What It Used to Be

After years of breakneck building, the only signs of life in the housing market are multifamily homes.

October 15, 2018 at 5:29 PM UTC

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

Illustration: George Wylesol for Bloomberg Businessweek

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This article is part of the October 22, 2018 issue of businessweek.

In the 1990s and 2000s, U.S. homebuilders put up houses by the millions and millions. In the 2010s, not so much. Even after six straight years of gains, single-family housing starts so far this year are running at only about half the pace of 2005, and rising interest rates seem likely to keep the pace from going much higher.

Apartments are another matter. Multifamily construction isn’t setting any records, but it recovered more quickly after the recession than single-family developments did, and its share of overall residential building remains higher than it’s been—apart from a blip here and there—since the apartment boom of the mid-1980s.