When you figure it takes us five years to catch up to the rest of the country, we’re not even close to the bottom. The housing market isn’t getting worse, it just isn’t getting much better: “Five years into the worst housing depression since the 1930s, the latest monthly data from the Census Bureau indicate that the homebuilding industry is slowly coming back to life. Housing starts jumped 9.3 percent in November to an annual rate of 685,000, the highest in 19 months.”