A new interactive map from the Washington Post, illustrating a story about how the nation's economic recovery over the last decade has been far from complete, and heavily weighted toward wealthy areas, is a stark reminder of how unusual the Bay Area has been as a whole in terms of the rapid appreciation of real estate. Also, if you zoom in on the Bay Area as we did in the screenshot above, it's painfully clear how much the inner Bay Area, and especially SF, Oakland, Berkeley, and Peninsula have benefited from the recent boom, while middle-class cities just outside the reach of BART where housing development was extremely rapid in the last decade, like Tracy, Antioch, Vacaville, and American Canyon in Napa, have in fact seen drops in home values of anywhere from 7 to 24 percent in the last ten years.
This is all based on housing price data between 2004 and 2015 from Black Knight Financial Services, and you can see a similar thing happening in Boston, where homes near the city center and in Boston proper have seen gains in value of 40 percent or more, while just outside and within less than 20 miles, home prices have either remained flat or lost gone down 10 percent or more in that same period.
In the nation as a whole, a typical single-family home has gone up in value only 14 percent in those ten years, or just over one percent per year, while in wealthier neighborhoods it's been over two percent annually, or an average of 21 percent.
Meanwhile, in San Francisco, zip codes like 94114 (Castro/Noe) and 94117 (Nopa/Alamo Square) have seen jumps in value close to 100 percent. In the Western half off the city, zip codes 94121 and 94122 (Richmond and Sunset, respectively) have seen healthy 65 percent gains.
The slimmest gains near SF were still well above the national average: Daly City, with 31 to 36 percent; Half Moon Bay with 33 percent, and Alameda with 33 percent.
The map as a whole is also a striking illustration of the movements back into cities where urban areas would have seen more falling home values in the 1980's and into the 90's in some cases, it's now the suburbs that aren't faring as well in places like Boston and the Bay Area. And in California, San Diego home prices haven't done nearly so well in the last decade, while Los Angeles has seen home prices rise on average around 50 percent, with only Venice Beach seeing the 100 percent rises we've seen in SF as that area became more fashionable in the last ten years.
And as the Post points out:
Also striking is how minority neighborhoods lag in the recovery. Zip codes where blacks are the largest population group are more than twice as likely as white Zip codes to have homes now worth less than in 2004.
At least in SF, there are signs that things have shifted, with a wee 1.8 percent year-over-year drop recorded in March, and with more people saying they're fed up, vowing to leave, or expecting an economic downturn soon.
Previously: SF Homes Prices, Heart Rates, Just Dropped For The First Time In 4 Years
