The government’s plan to get a lot of houses off the market seems to be working.  A report released today indicated that, on a month-over-month basis, new home sales rose by an impressive 11 percent in June.

You can thank lower prices, lower interest rates, and the $8,000 tax credit for that big bump, which signals that nice roofs are now over the heads of a significant number of people.

Also worth thinking about: those roofs aren’t over the heads of people who didn’t pay for them, meaning squatters and the homeless are a little less likely to invade America’s suburbs.  (Hey, we were worried about a second Great Depression for a while, remember?)

Anyway, in more precise terms, the U.S. Department of Commerce said that we’ve reached a seasonally adjusted annual rate of about 384,000 home sales, which sounds nice.

Then here’s a bit more good news: although only by small percentages, the Dow, Nasdaq, and S&P 500 all ended the day up.