The annual real estate forecast season opened this week with an estimate that the end of 2009 won't be much better than the beginning, and capital home builders will sell just 3,400 new houses, condos and town houses this year.

It's hardly a wonder that home builders say their powerful industry, so long accustomed to getting its way politically and economically, is in a depression, not a recession.

Such a sales number – shockingly low, projected by consultant Hanley Wood Market Intelligence – hasn't been heard in this region since the 1960s.

Home Front took out the history books to compare: In 1967, with President Lyndon Johnson in the White House, builders in El Dorado, Placer, Sacramento and Yolo counties started 3,544 single-family detached homes, according to the Construction Industry Research Board. It's likely they sold roughly the same.

This year, considering that 85 percent of sales regionally are single-family homes, they'll sell about 2,900. Add in the townhouses and condos and you get the 3,400.

"Sacramento can support about 8,500 sales a year," Hanley Wood's Sacramento analyst Kathryn Boyce told a gathering of about 75 to 80 area home-building industry reps. "We stole from the future quite a bit from the heyday when we had our special financing. If they had a pulse, we gave them a loan."

Stimulus aid for high-rise

Here's some better economic news. Federal stimulus funding is bringing $10 million to restore an empty residential high-rise at Seventh and I streets in downtown Sacramento.

"We were high-fiving each other. It's not every day you get $10 million in a competitive grant project," said Nick Chhotu, director of public housing at the Sacramento Housing and Redevelopment Agency. The money is headed to a thorough face-lift for the 12-story Riverview Apartments owned by SHRA. It's a senior complex built in the late 1970s at 626 I St. The building has been empty for two years.

Plans are to start construction late next year after getting up to $6 million more in federal funds. The building, with 108 rooms for people 62 and older, needs new windows, a new electrical system and new plumbing, a job that will run well into 2011, said Chhotu.

The Public Housing Capital funds are provided through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

Mixed-use to cut driving

How much do residents of Sacramento's eastern suburbs and foothills love their cars? Plenty. They lead the region in driving, averaging 75 miles a day. But another forecast on the PowerPoint circuit last week suggests they'll be driving a lot less by 2035.

The next generation of drivers, in Placer County especially, will live in neighborhoods with a greater mix of uses, said Mike McKeever, chief of the Sacramento Area Council of Governments. He told a gathering of Urban Land Institute-Sacramento members that shopping, home and work will be closer together as cities like Roseville and Rocklin urbanize more.

El Dorado Hills and its environs will have "more jobs in the foothills to balance houses," McKeever said.

And look, too for still less driving in the Sacramento-West Sacramento core, he said.

Consultant on Net radio

Look who's talking now on Internet radio. It's long-time Sacramento-area building industry consultant John Schleimer. He has a new VoiceAmerica Talk Radio Network show, "Housing in America." The show debuts Monday at 2 p.m. PDT.

Schleimer, owner of Roseville-based Market Perspectives, will launch with a show on the federal government's Making Home Affordable loan modification program. Guests include a U.S. Treasury Department official and New York Times economics reporter Peter Goodman.

Guests on coming shows, running weekly at the same time, include economist Mark Zandi of Moody's Economy.com and National Association of Home Builders Chairman Joe Robson. The show streams live on the Internet. Details: Google VoiceAmerica and click on "hosts."

Call The Bee's Jim Wasserman, (916) 321-1102. Read his blog on real estate, Home Front, at www.sacbee.com/blogs.