Dive Brief:

• The U.S. housing market is "segmented" and a "crapshoot," according to Karl "Chip" Case, the Wellesley College economics professor who founded the S&P/Case-Shiller home-price index with Yale University's Robert Shiller.
• The market is not recovering the way it has from past recessions, Case added. House prices go up in some areas at some times, rather than fairly uniformly as they have in the past.
• Housing starts got back above the annualized 1 million pace this spring, but Case said the behavior in this recovery makes him uncertain if that will hold up and be a turning point toward a more normal market.

Dive Insight:

Case notes that for the past half-century, housing starts have oscillated between about 1 million a year and 2 million, depending on economic conditions. The fall to 500,000 a year during the recession was a shock, however, and the market is not bouncing back in the way it has after previous downturns.