U.S. construction spending rose to an annual rate of $869.1 billion in April, a 2.7 percent increase from March, but is still down 10.5 percent from April 2009, according to numbers released today by the U.S. Department of Commerce.

Both private and public construction numbers rose from March, but spending rates from January through April are down 13.2 percent from the same period last year.

Overall, residential construction was up from a year ago, but non-residential construction was down 16 percent. The biggest dropoff in non-residential numbers was a 59 percent decline in lodging construction from last year’s numbers.

“The turn in housing is encouraging,” Michael Englund, chief economist at Action Economics LLC in Boulder, Colo., told Bloomberg. “We’ve cleared away enough new homes inventories that at least we can add some construction. Non-residential construction is still quite weak.”