WASHINGTON – U.S. home builders are coming off their two worst years in more than a half-century, and the outlook for this year is only slightly better.

Economists say it could take three more years before the industry begins building homes at a healthy rate. In the meantime, the housing downturn is dragging on the broader economy, with one-quarter of the jobs lost since the recession began occurring in the construction field.

Builders normally help lead the economy out of a recession. Construction projects fuel growth and that leads to more hiring. But a year-and-a-half after the recession officially ended, builders are struggling to compete in markets flooded with unsold homes, many of them foreclosures that are depressing prices.

“Housing in the past has always been one of the key drivers getting the economy back on track. It is not going to happen this time because there is a huge glut of homes out there,” said Patrick Newport, U.S. economist at IHS Global Insight.

Home builders broke ground on 587,600 homes in 2010, up 6 percent from the 554,000 started in 2009, the Commerce Department said Wednesday. Those are the lowest annual total starts in records dating back to 1959.

And the pace is getting worse. The Commerce Department reported Wednesday that builders started work at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 529,000 new homes and apartments last month. That’s a drop of 4.3 percent from November and the slowest pace since October 2009.

A big reason for the decline is that people are buying fewer single-family homes, which represent nearly 80 percent of the market. Single-family home construction fell 9 percent to an annual rate of 417,000 units in December.

In a healthy economy, home builders break ground on more than 1.5 million units a year.

Newport said he doesn’t expect that level of home construction until 2014. He expects builders will start work on 685,000 homes this year, 1.09 million units in 2012, and 1.43 million in 2013.

Many potential buyers are holding off, worried that home prices haven’t bottomed out yet. A record 1 million homes were lost to foreclosure last year, and that is weighing on prices. Foreclosure tracker RealtyTrac Inc. predicts 1.2 million homes will be repossessed this year.

Builders are having a hard time competing with the depressed prices, and that has led to fewer construction jobs.

Nearly 1.9 million of those jobs have vanished since the recession began in December 2007. That’s 26 percent of the 7.2 million jobs lost during that period.

Housing construction fell in all parts of the country in December except in the West, where activity surged 45.8 percent. Construction dropped 38.4 percent in the Midwest and was down 24.7 percent in the Northeast and 2.2 percent in the South.

Severe winter weather likely affected activity in the Northeast and Midwest.