Ron Sims’ HUD-shotThe Department of Housing and Urban Development–i.e. that federal giant now being Deputy-Secretaried by a man we call Sims–released its much-awaited Regional Activity Report (pdf) on May 29th. The skinny: Our region lost a bunch of jobs from March of ’08 to March of ’09 and had all sorts of doughy softness in the real estate market. But how’s this for a kicker? We’re still building, or at least preparing to do so. In the first three months of 2009, developers had permits to build 1,932 new units of housing in the Seattle-Tacoma area. That’s the 6th-most of any area in the country–trailing only the metropolitan areas of Houston, Dallas, New York, DC, and Austin.