U.S. home prices have fallen further since 2006 than during the 1990-91 recession, and experts predict prices will drop up to 10% more next year. (more…)

What happened to the Florida economy on outgoing Gov. Jeb Bush’s eight-year watch could be told by numbers:

Good ones. There all almost 1.4 million more jobs in Florida now than when he took office. There’s also a jobless rate that hit an all-time low of 3 percent during his tenure, thanks in large part to a booming Florida housing market. It’s a touch higher than 3 percent now, but still well below the national rate.

Bad ones. That same housing market has led to a strikingly higher cost of living. Low Florida mortgage costs drove up realty prices beyond the reach of many buyer, and the situation is made worse by skyrocketing insurance costs that Bush seemed powerless to do anything about.

Property insurance and property taxes have increased as values have gone up, and as local governments have been forced to put up new the school buildings and services to match population growth, another hallmark of the Bush years. That population growth, incidentally, is only expected to escalate as the years pass.

Ones that are still unclear. Take the hundreds of jobs and the promise of more in what Bush calls the “knowledge economy.” They’re jobs brought by Bush’s drive to shift Florida away from low-wage, tourism-reliant work to the future, where a stereotypical Florida worker wears a lab coat instead of a Disney character costume.

But the story of Florida’s economy during Bush’s tenure is better told by people, like those who work for Atwell-Hicks, a development engineering firm in Michigan that looked at Florida’s housing boom and decided to get in on the action. In 2005, the company opened a Tampa Bay area office.

“We started out with two people and we’ve been adding people every month to keep up with demand,” said Terry Simpson, a vice president at the Brighton, Michigan-based firm. “We have since moved twice to bigger office space because the growth has been so rapid.”

Many of the company’s Florida employees had to buy a home, and furniture and appliances to put in it, creating work for even more people. By all accounts, the Florida economy has been fueled by that home building.

“If you had a homesite to build on, you could sell a house,” said Mike Hickman, owner of Hickman Homes in Lakeland.

Economists generally say Bush can’t take much credit for the housing boom - it was fueled at least in part by astoundingly low Florida home mortgage rates and by retirement-age demographics.

Many developers agree, including former Senate President John McKay, a Republican whose Bradenton company develops commercial real estate.

“Florida’s economy’s been the beneficiary of a lot of things, from the general good state of the national economy over the last five years to the aging baby boomers … all moving to Florida,” McKay said.

“We could have elected a polar opposite governor and you would still have the same thousands a day pouring over the border,” agreed Bruce Nissen, director of research at the Center for Labor Research and Studies at Florida International University.

Bush does take some credit, arguing Florida’s low taxes lure and retain businesses. Many business owners agree it’s better than higher tax states for attracting workers. Bush says the tax cuts he pushed helped, but also points to efforts to curtail lawsuits and to lower workers compensation insurance costs.