The Commerce Department logs a 1.2 percent decline in the month of October. The not-quite-so-bad news in all of this is that non-residential construction is only down 0.7 percent, federal construction spending was up 5.5 percent and state and local spending rose 0.3 percent. Still, with residential down for so long a lot of residential site development contractors have migrated towards commercial work, making for increasingly aggressive bidding.