housing affordable. that means we ve got to strengthen the fha so it gives today s families the same kind of chance it gave my grandparents to buy a home and it preserves those rungs on the ladder of opportunity. and we ve got to the support, as i said, affordable rental housing and by the way, we ve got to keep up our fight against homelessness. the mayor of phoenix has been doing a great job here in phoenix on that front. we ve got to continue to improve it. now, since i took office, we helped bring one in four homeless veterans off the streets. we should be proud of that. here in phoenix, thanks to the hard work of everyone from mayor stand to the local united way to us airways, you re on track to end chronic homelessness for veterans, period, by 2014.
nearly two-thirds. millions of families have been able to come up for air. they re no longer underwater on their mortgages. and just like the crisis hit phoenix very hard, hanks to some great leadership here locally, phoenix is also led one of the biggest comebacks in the country. so you should be proud of what you ve done here. home prices in phoenix have risen by nearly 20% over the last year. new home sales are up by more than 25%. this morning, right before i came here, i visited erickson construction. weigh got some erickson folks here. and they were explaining how right when the bubble hit, erickson shrank to less than 100 workers. today, they re employing 580 people and they re hiring even
of scratching the child s height on the door of their new home with pencil, of course. we can do all this if we work together. and it won t be easy, but you if we take just a few bold steps and if washington will just end the gridlock, set an slide the slash and burn partisanship, actually try to solve problems instead of scoring political points, our economy will grow stronger a year from now, five years from now, ten years from now, and as long as i ve got the privilege to serve as your president, that s what i m going to be fighting for. thank you very much, everybody. god bless you. we ve been watching the president speaking at desert vis tas high school in phoenix, arizona. marking the. john: going recovery of the united states housing market. but also arguing that much more could be done to stabilize the sector. he referred to the parade of
bubble. and especially in some places like arizona. it was devastating when that bubble finally burst. triggered a recession. millions of american who are done everything right were hurt badly by the actions of other people. housing prices plummeted. by the time i took office, home values had fallen almost 20% from the year before. new housing starts had fallen nearly 80% from their peak. hundreds of thousands of construction workers had lost their jobs, a record number of people were behind on their mortgage payments. and you know, a lot of people here in phoenix, they saw that devastation. of this was part of ground zero for it the housing bubble bursting. so less than a month after i took office, i came here to arizona and i laid out steps to stabilize the housing market and
but we ve got to keep going because nobody in america and certainly no veteran should be left to live on the streets. so here s the bottom line. put all these principles together. that s going to protect our entire economy. and it will improve the housing market not just here in phoenix but throughout the state and throughout the country. we re also going to need to make sure though that we re protecting individual home owns. we ve got give them the tools that they can protect themselves. so we ve got a consumer finance protection bureau that we created. and it s laying down new rules of the road that everybody can count on when they re shopping for a mortgage. they re designing a new simple