Headlines and Homebuilding

Headline A: Home building jumps
Headline B: Building permits drop to five-month low

Link here.

Being an optimist, I was hoping: "Home Building Jumps 15 Percent in September."

These are the data points from the article:

• Most of the gain was in volatile apartment construction (the snapshot is hardly a trend, in other words)
• Single-family homes, representing 70 percent of construction, rose only slightly
• But here was the bottom line, buried (and it could have been the headline, and it would have been under a different editor): building permits fell to a five-month low.