After the release on Thursday of disappointing housing starts but encouraging building permit numbers for April, we’ll do so again now. Start with this helpful chart from Capital Economics:

Its optimism is based mainly on its analysis of expected household formation growth, which Sweeney finds has been underestimated by most observers. The note includes a good discussion of the ways in which healthy household formation growth can have powerful multiplicative effects throughout the rest of the economy. We’ve covered much of this ground before, and of course don’t forget to follow Calculated Risk and Karl Smith, who anticipated these trends before anyone else.