Housing Starts-Why we need new metrics

Housing starts and foreclosures offer insight into the current economic malaise in the United States. They also reflect an ingrained view of consumption measures as the yardstick for economic health. Our measurement system is driving us to establish conditions similar to those before the recession.

If we just take housing starts, we have a measure that reflects not just the willingness and desire of American’s to own homes and the property that surrounds them, but also the ancillary  dollars spent outfitting those homes. With horrible tight credit, any under-qualified borrowers will be unlikely to spend huge amounts on any new home. Home ownership is an area of stress, especially in a de-leveraging economy. The measure does not reflect the current mode of conservative cash positions.

In the current climate, the most health indicator may be the continued resistance of individuals to bite off more than they can chew. We should be seeing this as a positive move toward a more sustainable economy, one less prone to bubbles and bursts. If we are looking for positive home ownership metrics, we should be looking at:

• Lower requests for second mortgages
• Investments in energy reduction for existing homes, along with actual lower use of energy in homes
• Basic investments in home maintenance (paint, rust, plumping repair, etc.)
• Re-sale home value

This is just one example of how our national strategy continues to reflect the industrial age proclivity for consumption, when we know that consumption-based economics leads to boom and bust. Sustainable economic models would be less volatile by nature. We won’t get to a new economic platform overnight, but we will never get there if we don’t start modifying what we measure and define what economic success looks like.  Does success look like the return of low wage manufacturing jobs from China, or new high wage knowledge economy jobs fuels by innovation and the reinvention of education? We may have to navigate our futures, but we do influence our short term destiny by choosing what we think is important, and making those choices even more important by tying our national health to the measurement of those factors. If we want an innovative future, we need to start measuring the positive change in attitudes rather than those things that that defined success in the 1930s and 40s.