Over the past 48 years, U.S. homes have more than doubled in value. All real estate being local, a new report examines which states have had the most and least value appreciation.
In 1970, the inflation-adjusted median home value in the U.S. was $107,291. By 2017, the the national median appreciated 103 percent to $217,600, with more than half of all U.S. states experiencing more than 100 percent median home value gains. Washington, D.C. came out on top in Business Insider's list of home value appreciation with 352 percent growth from 1970 to 2017. California (249 percent), Oregon (228 percent), Colorado (220 percent), and Massachusetts (196 percent) rounded out the top five.
The cost to buy a home in America is more expensive than it's ever been — so much so that millennial homeownership is at record lows because they have to spend more time saving money for a down payment.
So just how much has the value of a home changed over the past 50 years? To find out, we took to the U.S. Census Bureau, which provides a table showing median home values from previous decades in each state and the District of Columbia. We compared the median home value in 1970, adjusted for inflation to 2017 dollars using the Consumer Price Index, to the median home value in 2017, according to the Census Bureau's American Community Survey, and calculated the percentage change.
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