Here is how bad the housing market has become: bad news is now treated as good news.

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/112509dnbuscaseshiller.c4f033.html

Home prices in the Dallas-Fort Worth area are down 1.2 percent from last year. Yet because the drop wasn’t bigger than that, it’s being treated as good news. It’s not.

“We have seen broad improvement in home prices for most of the past six months,” Standard & Poor’s David M. Blitzer said Tuesday in the report. “However the gains in the most recent month are more modest than during the seasonally strong summer months.”

Pardon me if I don’t get excited about more bad news about the economy. I’ll contain my enthusiasm until housing values actually go up, not down.