In most of the western world which have had housing crash in last 3/4 years, unemployment was quite low before the crash, Massive unemployements in these countries was the effect of crash not the cause, this is due to the fact that most of the job creations (last 8/10 years) was in housing and related service/retail sectors.This is a classic case of debt driven housing boom.
In australia we keep bragging about commodity sector being reason for low unemployment which in reality employs only around 5% of total employment here.
