On the program today, housing, robotaxies, and hey, what does this button do?

From American public media.

This is Marketplace. In Los Angeles, I'm Kai Rizzol.

It is Tuesday today.

This one is the 19th of November.

Good as always to have you along, everybody.

There is, amid all the hub of over who's in and who's out of which cabinet appointment, there is some

actual economic news with which to familiarize you, and for us today, we have chosen a housing,

and it's a mixed bag, TBH. The Census Bureau informed us today that housing starts slid about

3% in October from a month earlier, mostly due to those hurricanes in the southeast.

Before you can start a house, of course, you've got to have a permit to start a house,

and those permits were down nearly 8% over a year earlier.

On the glass-half-full side of things, though,

home builders are apparently feeling a bit more, you know, glass-half-full-ish.

The National Association of

Home Builders says its confidence index has been up three months in a row now. Add all that to the

well-reported realities of not enough houses, many of which are really expensive and mortgage rates

going back up again. And what you get is Marketplace's Matt Levin reporting that there is still a whole

lot of uncertainty in the new home market for both builders and buyers. The Federal Reserve's recent

rate cuts have helped Portland, Oregon home builder Justin Wood. The construction loans he takes

out from banks to build townhomes and cottages are cheaper. We are directly tied to the Fed funds rate. So when they come down three quarters of a point,

we come down three quarters of a point. You know, it's a difference of a few thousand dollars of

...