NEW YORK — Housing led the U.S. out of seven of the past eight recessions. This time, it could kill the recovery.

Home sales collapsed after a federal tax credit for buyers expired in April. Since then, the manufacturing-led expansion, which began in the second half of 2009, has been waning, with jobless claims rising and factory orders falling.

If foreclosures continue to mount and depress home prices, that could send the economy back into a recession, said Celia Chen, an economist who tracks the industry for Moody's Analytics Inc. The housing market and the broader economy are closely intertwined.

Spending on home construction and items such as furniture and stoves accounted for about 15 percent of the gross domestic product in the second quarter, according to Moody's Analytics.

Real estate also can influence consumer spending indirectly. When values soared in the mid-2000s, people used the boost in equity to pay for cars and vacations. After prices fell, homeowners lost that cushion and curbed spending.

A report today from the National Association of Realtors will show that July sales of existing homes plummeted 12.9 percent from June, the biggest monthly loss of 2010, according to the median estimate of economists surveyed by Bloomberg News.

New-home sales, which account for less than a 10th of housing transactions, stayed at the second- lowest level on record last month, economists predict Commerce Department data will show Wednesday.

Housing continues to be stuck in the doldrums, said Harvard University professor Jeffrey Frankel, a member of the business-cycle dating committee at the National Bureau of Economic Research, the arbiter of when U.S. recessions begin and end.

Central Texas' housing market is doing better than some others. For the first seven months of the year, sales are up 5 percent and the median price is up 2 percent, according to the Austin Board of Realtors. But there are a record 11,700 homes on the market, and the pace of sales has fallen sharply with the end of federal buyer tax credits. With 14.6 million Americans out of work, homeowners nationwide are struggling to hold onto their properties. One in seven mortgages were delinquent or in foreclosure during the first quarter, the highest in records dating to 1979, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association. Foreclosures probably will top 1 million this year, said RealtyTrac Inc., a data company.

Federal efforts to help have had little success. Of 1.3 million loan modifications started under the Obama administration's Home Affordable Modification Program, 48 percent were canceled by the end of July, the Treasury Department said last week. More than half of all modifications defaulted again within 12 months, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency said June 23.

The sidelined house hunters include Marion and Jim Lasswell, who said they spend most weekends looking at homes for sale near Raleigh, N.C. His engineering job at iRobot Corp. is secure, the couple's credit is good, and they have saved enough for a 20 percent down payment, Marion Lasswell said. The problem: They don't think the market has hit bottom.

We're still watching prices drop, Lasswell, 38, a registered nurse, said. She said they won't buy until there's an awesome deal.

Home prices tumbled 33 percent from their July 2006 peak to the low in April 2009, according to the S&P/Case-Shiller 20-city index. They may drop another 20 percent by 2012 if the economy slips back into a recession, according to Chen, the Moody's Analytics economist.

Consumer spending rose 1.6 percent in the second quarter, down from 1.9 percent in the previous three months. Purchases of home furnishings and appliances fell 1.7 percent to an annual pace of $256.5 billion in June from a 2010 high in April, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

There is an epidemic of thrift, said NARiman Behravesh, chief economist at IHS Inc. Households and businesses are super-cautious right now. Sometime in the next 6 to 12 months, we'll start to see more movement on home and car purchases and greater willingness on the part of businesses to hire.

A sustained economic recovery depends on the job growth required to boost consumer spending, said Behravesh of IHS. The unemployment rate may average 9.6 percent this year, based on the median estimate of economists in a Bloomberg News survey. That would be the highest annual rate since 1983.

While the Lasswells in North Carolina said they'll keep spending their weekends looking at homes, they aren't in a hurry to buy. I don't see things getting better, Marion Lasswell said. I expect prices to be flat for a long time.