The Sandwich Democratic Town Committee

Tucked away in last month’s employment report — a report that you may recall carried the happy surprise of an increase of more than 230,000 new jobs and a 2/10 percentage point drop in the  unemployment rate — was a statistic that surprised experts. Among the jobs added were 48,000 new construction jobs. That made specialists sit up straight in a hurry. It signaled a surprising turnaround might be on the way for the housing market.

Today, we have confirmation of that suspicion and it appears to be unusually robust. The New York Times reports a “Sudden Rise in Home Demand Takes Builders By Surprise.” The story comments that after six years of sitting on the sidelines home buyers are streaming back into the market, a market that apparently has scant inventory for sale. In Sacramento, where the decline in the housing market was among the worst in the country, the median sales price has increased 15% in the last year. Across the country, home prices are up an average of 7.3 percent.

The housing turnaround seems to have caught almost everyone in the business by surprise. As desirable as the long-awaited improvement may be, the unusually low level of homes for sale is creating widespread problems for buyers and sellers alike, leading to bidding wars and bubblelike price jumps in places that not long ago were suffering from major declines.

The positive effects of these kinds of trends tend to build on each other and lead to better, greater results over the long term. This is good news for the country and for the Democrats, but not such good news for the negativists and doomsayers among Republicans who seem to still be intent on making this President fail.