Housing Starts September 2026: Total Slips as Single-Family Build Holds

Total U.S. housing starts fell 5.2 percent in September to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.221 million, the Census Bureau's New Residential Construction report shows, but the pullback is not the broad slowdown it looks like at first glance. All of the decline sits in multifamily, where starts tumbled 25.9 percent from a year earlier, while single-family starts, the segment that tracks the for-sale market buyers actually compete for, rose 2.6 percent year over year to 859,000. That split is the whole point of this print: builders keep adding single-family supply slowly, developers are stepping back from apartments, and affordability, not demand, is what is capping the rate of new home…