Housing Crash 2.0 Is Accelerating -- and will be far worse than the first, but hey, Dancing With the Stars is on!

House prices are falling again—and the decline is accelerating.

Today’s big housing numbers comes from the Case-Shiller home price indexes. The indexes, which measure how prices have changed over the previous three months, show prices falling in every major metropolitan area (except, weirdly, Detroit). The 20-city average declined 3.3 percent from a year ago, and 1.1 percent from the previous three-month average.

This is the seventh successive month of widespread price declines.

The housing recovery began to stall last spring, after the government’s home-buyer tax credit expired. The three-month moving average of the Case-Shiller 20-city index showed that gains in home pricing slowing to a crawl in early summer and actually reversing in July and August. By September, it was clear that home prices were going into a serious decline.

The November numbers (which are actually the three-month average of September, October and November) showed a 1 percent decline over the previous month. Prices kept dropping by 1 percent in December and January.

February’s data shows that the decline is actually accelerating a bit.

This is the opposite of a recovery—it’s a crash building steam. (read more)