Everyone knows that house prices rose in the aughts and then crashed in the lead-up to the Great Recession. But housing is also a quintessentially local market — you can’t just swap a home in San Francisco for one in Detroit.
This map shows how house prices have evolved in America’s biggest cities
This great animated map of home values in different areas from HowMuch.net illustrates both how prices changed over time and how they vary from place to place:
One thing that really jumps out here is the explosion of the Florida real estate market during the early mid-aughts. The United States has a longstanding divide between more expensive metro areas in the Northeast and Pacific Coast and cheaper ones in the heartland. But Tampa and Miami spend the ‘90s looking cheap and then suddenly turn very pricey before collapsing.
The flip side of that is that Texas’s housing markets were largely insulated from the bubble trend. The Dallas area had an unrelated price explosion in the ‘80s related to the oil industry, but in the aughts Texans build a lot of new houses and had regulations limiting how much debt they could take on, so things stayed relatively under control there.
