According to a Sept. 29 story by Bloomberg News, which you can read here, officials with the National Association of Home Builders are asking members of Congress to pass a $15,000 tax credit for all homebuyers. This, officials with the trade association hope, will entice consumers to purchase homes.

Crain’s Chicago Business , one of the top business publications around, recently wrote a small story about the high number of new-construction homes that have yet to be finished. Crain’s refers to them as white elephants.

Here’s a sure sign that the housing market is struggling: Walk through your neighborhood. Have all those “For Sale” signs you used to see become “For Rent” signs? Then you know there’s trouble in the housing market.

I’ve criticized the major real estate associations in the past for spinning bad real estate news. The associations have blamed the media for making the housing crisis seem worse than it is. They’ve claimed that the current real estate slump is just a natural correction. And they’ve spent months predicting that we’ve finally reached the bottom of the market.

According to CNN, in the 12 months that ended June 30 of this year, nearly 25 percent of homes sold across the country sold for less than the sellers originally paid for the house. This, of course, is a disastrous transaction for sellers, probably only made under duress. The sellers had to sell now, and had no other options.

We all know that the residential real estate market is mired in a deep slump. We also know that home prices across the country are either dropping or stagnant. It seems that a majority of homeowners, though, think that it’s everybody else’s homes that are declining in value.

It’s not easy selling a home in today’s down residential market. Just scroll through this blog and you’ll read post after post on slowing home sales and dropping asking prices. So it’s especially important today to give your home every possible advantage when you put it on the market.

But no one can say that the editors at Crain’s Chicago Business aren’t working extra hard — maybe a bit too hard — to find the good news in the local housing market.

How common are housing foreclosures becoming? According to RealtyTrac, an online publisher of foreclosure data, one in every 194 U.S. households received a foreclosure filing during the first quarter of the year.

Now that spring is here, despite the snow on my Midwest front lawn, we’ll see how deep the residential real estate market’s slump is.