WASHINGTON — The housing slump intensified at the end of last year, pushing home construction down by the biggest amount in nearly 30 years.

Analysts forecast more bad news in the months ahead with the big question remaining whether the housing slump will be severe enough to push the country into a recession.

The Commerce Department reported yesterday that construction was started on 1.353 million new homes and apartments last year, down 24.8 percent from 2006. It was the second biggest annual decline on record, exceeded only by a 26 percent plunge in 1980.

The year ended on a weak note with construction dropping by 14.2 percent in December and applications for new building permits, an indicator of future activity, falling for a seventh consecutive month.

Economists said the current housing slump has already surpassed the 1990 downturn and will likely rival, if not surpass, the prolonged housing downturn in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a period when the Federal Reserve was pushing interest rates to the highest levels since the Civil War in a successful effort to halt a 10-year bout of high inflation.

Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Economy.com, forecasts that median sales prices for existing homes will fall by 2.5 percent for all of 2007, which would be the first annual price decline on records that go back 40 years.

"I think this housing downturn will be unprecedented in terms of its breadth across the country and in its severity," Zandi said. "I don't think we have seen anything like this, certainly since the Great Depression, and back then housing was much less of a factor in terms of the overall economy because fewer people owned their own homes."

The troubles are expected to push overall economic growth to 1 percent or less, meaning the economy will be very near the stall level of a recession.