Which Cities Have Recovered the Most and the Least from the Great Recession?

The late 2000s were not kind to the housing industry, but the builders able to stay in the field picked themselves up and got back to work. And for many, their hard work is paying off due to prospering local economies: Some cities, especially in the West, are thriving with housing price indexes higher than they were pre-recession. It's not all roses, however. In other cities, it is as if the recession never ended. Almost a quarter of the largest metro cities have not recovered yet even after a decade of rebuilding due to difficult local economies. Find out the cities that have recovered the most and the least since the Great Recession. 

U.S. home prices peaked in the years leading up to the Great Recession and fell dramatically when the housing bubble burst. In fact, national data from the House Price Index (HPI) shows that home prices dropped by 33% between April 2006 and March 2011. Though the economy has broadly recovered since then, home prices have not rebounded evenly nationwide. In this study, we determined which local housing markets have recovered the most and the least since the recession.

Using data from the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), we compared movements in the HPI for the 100 largest metro areas in the U.S. Specifically, we considered each metro area’s HPI change from its pre-crisis peak to trough, pre-crisis peak to current price and trough to current price. For details on our data sources and how we put all the information together to create our final rankings, check out the Data and Methodology section below.

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