During the Great Recession that began a decade ago, the U.S. housing industry almost came to a dead halt. Where the annual volume of new housing starts had reached a high of 1.6 million in its heyday during the last decade of the 1900s, these have barely reached 600,000 annual housing starts in recent years.
Many of these had been generated during the Clinton presidency (1993-2001) in large part for those who could ill afford the required monthly mortgage payments, even though interest rates had come down somewhat.