"Housing Still Can't Find A Date For Economic Recovery Dance"

Ain't that the truth! Like I've blogged about before, I think recovery will wait until 2014, or so. (The last housing slide lasted from 1990 to 1995 - five years. This slide is infinitely-worse, so I think it will require seven years from the peak in 2007, or 2014, before recovery becomes apparent.):

"You've had a lot of people who've held homes off the market because they don't want to compete with foreclosures. It's likely to be a buyer's market for awhile, mainly because there are so many homes on the market and there is still a limited supply of qualified buyers," Vitner said. "The supply of buyers is being limited by high unemployment and the large number of people with homes they can't sell."

Here's one grim indication of where housing stands. Before the housing bubble burst, residential investment accounted for about 6.3 percent of the nation's economic activity. Today, that number has fallen to around 2.4 percent, according to Michael Mussa, a former World Bank chief economist now with the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a research group.