U.S. home prices increase

For the first time since the end of 2006, home prices nationally posted an increase.

In some areas such as Tampa Bay, however, February prices reached new recessionary lows.

The Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller home price index released Tuesday squeezed out a 0.6 percent gain. But that was half the increase analysts had expected. On a more cautionary note, 11 of the 20 cities tracked by the index showed declines from February last year.

One of them was the Tampa Bay area, where prices dropped after months of stabilization, a sign perhaps, of how deeply mired Florida is in the mortgage crisis. But a new quarterly economic forecast for the state shows economic improvement this year, although Floridians should expect double digit unemployment rates during the next two years.

The home price data underscored the fragile nature of the housing recovery. Nationally, home prices are up more than 3 percent from the bottom in May 2009, but still are 30 percent below the May 2006 peak.

And there is a "risk that home prices could decline further before experiencing any sustained gains," cautioned David Blitzer, chairman of the S&P index committee. "It is too early to say that the housing market is recovering."

Prices are getting a boost from temporary tax credits that expire at the end of April. First-time buyers can claim up to $8,000 and homeowners who buy and relocate can get up to $6,500. So buyers have more purchasing power.

Prices in the Tampa-Clearwater-St. Petersburg metropolitan area fell 6 percent compared with February 2009, and 1.2 percent from January to February.

The index showed prices in Tampa and five other cities - Charlotte, Las Vegas, New York, Portland and Seattle - reached recent new lows in February.

Las Vegas saw the largest annual drop at almost 15 percent. San Francisco posted the biggest gain, at about 12 percent.

Florida's housing crisis has been worsened by long-term job losses that add to the glut of foreclosures on the market and push prices down.

Florida has lost so many jobs during the recession, unemployment will stay in the double digits into 2012, an economist at the University of Central Florida predicts.

But Florida's economy finally should start growing again this year and businesses should slowly hire people, Sean Snaith, director of the Institute for Economic Competitiveness at UCF, wrote in a recent economic report.

Snaith tracks Florida's roughly $750 billion economy every quarter. Recently, he issued his spring forecast, which shows that the state's "gross state product" will rise 2.1 percent this year. GSP is the value of goods and services produced in Florida in a year.

That's a good sign, because the state's economy fell during the past two years, including a 3.3-percent decline in 2009.

Among his other predictions:

•Slowly falling unemployment rate. Business and government will finally start some modest hiring this year, but it will take months to dent the state's unemployment rate. As of March, about 12.3 percent of Floridians were unemployed.

The jobless rate should fall to 12 percent by the end of this year, Snaith predicts. It should finally dip below 10 percent in the second quarter of 2012.

•Housing's return. After declining since 2006, new housing starts will climb a bit this year. Construction should start on an estimated 46,300 new single- and multifamily houses in 2010, compared with 34,500 houses last year. That's a positive sign, but it's still a paltry total compared with the mid-2000s. In 2005, for example, the state had an estimated 272,900 housing starts, the UCF economist noted.