When Raleigh, N.C.-based St. Lawrence Homes executive Rich Ohmann speaks, we know we have to listen.

Yesterday, it was what Rich made of the media's take on housing starts, which portrays home builders collectively as a villainous drag on a fragile economic recovery. Here's Ohmann's reaction:

I love this story. It blames housing for dragging down the ‘budding economic recovery.'  I would submit that the prior turns of home building were fueled by the creation of new home building firms (we were one of them in the mid-1980s). Today’s languishing condition is only partly due to the condition of the market (no disputing the fact that things are awful in our economy as a whole).  I would place the blame for a majority of the lack of vibrancy in home building on the fact that innovators and new business creators aren’t able to secure ANY funding for a venture large or small. A young entrepreneur can’t start up without cash, and there’s no credit. The old world entrepreneurs are still trying to figure out what to do with what they were left with when the world came to a screeching halt.

There’s no recovery without a credit source to fuel it. Am I the idiot here, or am I just one of many?

You are not alone, Rich.

As you know we've been on the road this week. Everywhere everyone in residential real estate--single-family, multifamily, affordable, etc.--wonders to us aloud, "What's happening out there? What are you hearing?"

What we're hearing is that there's no consensus on what's going on, as much as we crave a pattern and want to see a trend develop. Where there are bright spots, they're bright for isolated reasons. The theme and broader backdrop is still hugely challenging, save in part for the public home builders, whose almighty balance sheets will see them through another treacherous stretch of 12 months or more.

• We're hearing cheery one-offs from home builders such as Irvine, Calif.-based MBK Homes, that they're not only sold out on their planned homes through their current fiscal year-end, ending April 1, 2010, they're also 50% sold out for their coming new year.
• We're hearing this phrase repeatedly, and in more and more places: "We're buying finished lots. We have to."
• We're hearing that public companies that were doing 1% of their market's homes on volume of 1,400 homes a year, now have 4% market share doing less than a run-rate of 200 units a year. The publics can build; many privates can not given the cost of money to go vertical today.
• We're hearing that as long as a company has access to "internal finance," they can build. If they don't, they're SOL, and ergo a "drag on the economy," as the Associated Press story referenced above would contend.
• We're hearing that company after company that succumbed to the credit squeeze of 2008 and 2009 has a principal or three who're locking and loading to reenter the fray as Messrs. NewCo in 2010.
• We're hearing rumblings that the FDIC has begun operating in similar ways to the Resolution Trust Corp. in the 1990s.  When a bank goes into zombie mode and can't move on its real estate holdings because doing so would throw its entire capital structure into turmoil, the FDIC now comes in and takes the bank, and begins deploying the commercial real estate for 10 or 20 or 30 cents on the dollar, just like the RTC back in the day. The noteworthy thing is that the FDIC is trying to keep from letting the land go to speculators--rather, it's trying to place the residential land portfolios with companies who earnestly want to make a longer-term go of building communities out.
• We're hearing that job loss, job loss, job loss is the issue policy, and policymakers need to give their full attention for the next year, or many of them won't be in office after next year's mid-term elections.

In Phoenix alone, points out Marcus & Millichap VP for Investments Peter TeKampe, 300,000 people have lost their jobs since the economic heyday that ended in 2007.  In Atlanta, the number is 60,000. Apartment vacancy rates are on the rise. Household formations are stagnating. The structural drivers of the residential investment component of the GDP are challenged.

So, we've been wondering for months now, when home builders say, "I'm buying lots," what's on the other side of that equation? Are they buying lots to replace lots they've sold at full value? Is the scarcity in good finished lots in Phoenix, parts of Southern California, and even in Florida, Atlanta, and the D.C. metro area a scarcity caused by home buyer demand? Think again.

How can it be now, when other than a few exception veins of economic fortitude, earnings and well-being are so uncertain?

Among the biggest questions we face in our time, and we appear to be out of time to evade them, are these:

• How will Americans pay for health care?
• How will Americans both a) transition from dependence on non-domestic energy sources, and b) reduce its negative impact on climate and the environment?
• How will Americans segue into a new economy that can create demand for its workers?

Home builders--it is clear from a growing number of economists' diatribes and media muckraking--are being held up as chicanery-prone, money-hungry beneficiaries of both the up and the down side of the economic parabola.

So, we have a thought, and it springs from what we feel was a highly effective unified effort among home builders in support of the extension/expansion of the home buyer tax credit and the telescoping backward of the NOL tax carryback provisions for larger companies.

We feel that in light of how successful companies were in harmonizing their interests and telling their stories to elected officials, home builders should sustain their momentum, and keep their act together.

The Fix Housing First brand, in other words, could take on a new mission. It could build off its collaborative outreach among home building, real estate, the AARP, and other organizations, to go another step or two to move the economy where it needs to go.

Fresh from the victories achieved on Capitol Hill, we'd suggest the following for Ken Gear and the organization that lobbied so well to sustain the stimulus of housing demand.

• Keep the consortium of builders together to Fix Housing First;
• Focus the educational and policy influence program on housing's direct impact on jobs;
• Get public home builders actively involved with the FDIC's bank takeover programs to identify workforce housing districts in metro areas nationally; and
• Bring public and private home building companies together--using some percentage of the public home builders' accrued cash supply as a guaranty--to capitalize acquisition of land parcels from FDIC banks, set up fee-building opportunities, with municipal workforce needs as a primary driver.

This would be a story that elected officials could both understand and act on.

We're beginning to come to grips with the fact that the arduous, unbearably flat and grudging recovery ahead of us will continue to take a toll on what we knew as the home building landscape circa 2006. That world is done.

Home building companies need to account for how good and how trustworthy they have been and continue to be. That need goes 24/7. The minute one of them stops that, trust goes by the wayside, and a company is no longer a business.

Right now, home builders have an opportunity to seize on what they gained recently with Congress and the president, and continue the crusade to Fix Housing First, bringing their story to the public. This means staying together as a group, and putting resources and focus toward new economy solutions for one of our nation's chronic problems--workforce housing.

If the big builders can become part of that solution--and they have the means in both capital and skills to do it--then it will go far toward easing Rich Ohmann's, and many many others', anxieties about getting blamed for being both the cause of the catastrophe, the beneficiary of the rescue, and the dampener of sparks of economic momentum.