New housing construction starts

A demographic measurement and a count of foundation slabs, marching upward in step. Nobody is building a house because somebody came out, and yet the regression line keeps a straight face. The country is rearranging itself in two senses at once.

Self-identification as LGBTQ has roughly doubled in the US since 2012, driven mostly by Gen Z's willingness to use the labels in surveys; older cohorts changed less. Housing starts climbed for an unrelated reason: the post-2010 recovery from the housing crash, which saw construction crawl from a generational low back toward long-run norms. Both lines were starting from artificially low bases, and both bottomed out around the same time. Recoveries that share a starting line look like they are running together.

Two ways the country exited the 2008 freeze. One in identity, one in lumber. Independent thaws can look identical from a distance.