It was hardly a surprise but no less an ominous sign when Hachette yesterday announced it was closing Home, its long-suffering shelter title, citing tough economic times.

Home had seen a steep slide in ad pages over the first half of 2008, down 31 percent, and back in May longtime editor Olivia Monjo died, and she was not replaced, a pretty solid sign that the title's days were numbered.

October will be the last issue for the eight-times-a-year publication.

The shelter category in particular is feeling the heat of the America's distressed housing market, whose effects have spread wide to include cutbacks in advertising by manufacturers of home products and giant retailers like Home Depot as consumers cut back on nonessential spending.

"It's sort of like dominos. Bad economy, so nobody is buying homes," observes the Grim Reaper of Magazinedeathpool.com, a site that tracks magazine foldings. "If people don't have the money to buy them, they certainly are not fixing up their own homes. And if they're not fixing up their own homes, why buy a magazine about it?"

The big question now is what more titles might fold in the category. Home is the third title to fold within a year, following Martha Stewart's Blueprint in December and Conde Nast's House & Garden last September.

Total pages for the shelter category were down 9 percent for the first half of the year, and while Home certainly was down the most, it was hardly the only decliner. Six other titles saw declines, including Country Home, which was down 12 percent, and Traditional Home, which fell 15 percent.

The strong titles were those reaching the higher end of the market, notably Architectural Digest, whose pages were up 4 percent.

But even the high end of the shelter category is not out of danger. In this near-recession, as some economists are calling it, the affluent are suffering as well, as the values of their homes sink along with value of their investment portfolios.

“If you’re in the top 15 percent of consumers, you’re feeling the pain,” Britt Beemer, chairman of America’s Research Group in Charleston, S.C., recently told the Media Economy Newsletter. "Only the top 1.5 percent, according to our research, has been unscathed by this economic downturn. Those are the ultra-rich consumers.”

Further, there's little reason to believe the housing market will correct itself anytime soon, along with all the related ills.

But certainly contributing to Home’s downfall was its parent company, which has struggled through a series of closings in recent years, from Premiere to Elle Girl, and the short-lived Shock.

Earlier this summer, longtime Hachette chief Jack Kliger was told he was being replaced by Alain Lemarchand from the Paris office, and that's not a good sign.

A highly respected magazine executive, who had come over from Conde Nast in 1999, Kliger had struggled attempting to manage Hachette, long run on a shoestring, and its French owners, who never seemed to wrap their heads around the American marketplace.