Well, it's now painfully official: 2011 was the worst year on record for sales of new homes in the United States.
Experts had suspected that was the case, but the U.S. Commerce Department confirmed it recently.
The federal government began tracking new-home sales 49 years ago, and 2011 was the worst. The year ended on a particularly poor note, with December sales dipping 2.2 percent. The number of new houses sold last year was not even half the number of sales that are needed for a healthy economy.
That helps explain the agonizingly slow pace of economic growth -- a pace that hasn't been able to make a real dent in the U.S. unemployment rate, currently at 8.3 percent.
Lack of home construction puts a major strain on the economy as a whole. That's because the construction of just one house creates, on average, three jobs for one year and provides roughly $90,000 in tax revenue over time, according to the National Association of Home Builders.
So when home construction is exceptionally slow, as it was in 2011, there are plenty of negative ripple effects across the economy.
And the prospects for serious improvement seem slim. Hundreds of thousands of foreclosures are expected in 2012 -- on top of millions from the past few years. That will further glut the housing market and suppress demand for new-home construction.
Looking at the housing market, which has been extremely weak for several years now, can Washington at last admit that federal policies which promoted home loans for risky borrowers -- and led to the housing collapse -- were unwise?