Americans ditch home ownership [View all]

[FarCenter]

The development of multi-family units - a category made up of flats and townhouses - jumped 25.3pc last month to an annual rate of 238,000, the Commerce Department said on Tuesday. That helped drive overall construction on new homes up 9.3pc to an annual pace of 685,000, the strongest since the spring of 2010.

The better-than-expected figures were enough to cheer investors who have become accustomed to a flow of depressing news from the housing market since the bubble first burst in 2006. They also showed the degree to which the downturn is unwinding American homeownership, an objective of successive US governments since World War Two.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/houseprices/8968616/Americans-ditch-home-ownership.html
[hr]Hopefully this also indicates a trend towards more compact development which will require less transportation fuel.