Free Republic

Homebuilder confidence surged in November as the election of Donald Trump and a Republican sweep of the House and Senate boosted optimism about the housing market. The National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) said its monthly confidence index rose to 46, the highest level since April. This was higher than even the most bullish forecasts and three points above the October level. The sentiment boost reflects builders’ beliefs that the incoming administration and its Republican allies on Capitol Hill will adopt policies to facilitate increased construction activity. “With the elections now in the rearview mirror, builders are expressing increasing confidence...

The numbers: Construction of new homes fell 6.8% in July compared with the previous month, as builders scaled back new projects. Housing starts fell to a 1.24 million annual pace from 1.33 million in June, the government said Friday. That’s how many houses would be built over an entire year if construction were to continue at the same rate each month as in July. The data fell short of Wall Street’s expectations of a 1.34 million pace. All numbers are seasonally adjusted. Housing starts fell to the lowest level since May 2020. Outside of the pandemic, new-home construction was at...

Nanoparticle inks can turn your existing 2D printer into a circuit board production line – and the possibilities for 3D printers are mind-boggling. Printing foldable mobile phones on a sheet of paper from a normal 2D printer is just a decade away, according to Jürgen Steimle, head of the Embodied Interaction Group at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbrücken, Germany. Steimle and his colleagues took a step towards this in 2013, when they used a standard printer loaded with nanoparticle ink to print a paper circuit that works even after the sheet is torn. In the past couple...

A house in my neighborhood just blew up . The house next door to it caught on fire and is probably gone. The fire department has things under control.

WASHINGTON -- Market experts expecting the home construction lull to end some time soon are going to have to wait longer than hoped. The chief economist for the National Association of Home Builders said new home construction in the U.S. may take until 2011 to return to last year's level. According to the NAHB, monthly construction starts would need to jump by 21 percent to reach David Seiders' benchmark for full recovery — 1.85 million. There were 1.53 million construction stats in April, the Commerce Department reported. At the height of the five-year housing boom in January 2006, construction began...