New home sales tumbled in August to the slowest pace in 17 years, while the average sales price fell by the largest amount on record, demonstrating the depth of the problem that Washington is trying to solve.

New home sales have been slow across the country.

The Commerce Department said Thursday that new homes sales fell by 11.5 percent in August to a seasonally adjusted annual sales rate of 460,000 units, the slowest sales pace since January 1991.

It was a much bigger sales decline than the small 1 percent drop that economists had been expecting. The average price of a new home sold in August dropped by a record amount of 11.8 percent to $263,900,