Dark Side of Low Gas Prices: Slumping Housing Market

There’s a dark side to those delightfully low gas prices: slumping housing markets.

Home sales are down sharply this year in North Dakota’s oil patch and the West Texas cities of Midland and Odessa.

Home sales have also slowed in El Paso, and, more recently, in Houston.

The drilling boom brought tens of thousands of workers to oil fields in several states.

Then the price of oil tanked, plummeting by half in late 2014 and reaching levels this year not seen since the financial crisis.

Oil companies abandoned drilling projects and began laying off workers.