Justin Fox, Columnist

Housing Is Tanking in the Northeast. Guess Why.

Losing big deductions for state and local property taxes is having the expected effect.

October 25, 2018 at 1:26 PM UTC

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

Bad timing.
Photographer: Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images

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Sales of new single-family houses were down 13.2 percent in September from a year earlier, the Census Bureau reported Wednesday. That’s a lot — the biggest year-over-year percentage decline since April 2011, when the housing bust was still busting.

It is also within the margin of error. The Census Bureau doesn’t go out and count every home sold. It takes a sample, and it estimates that there is a 90 percent likelihood that actual home sales nationwide in September were somewhere between 26.8 percent lower than a year before and 0.4 percent higher. The midpoint of that range is 13.2 percent.