The interaction of a bubble in real estate prices with the banking and financial sector drove the US economy into the Great Recession. For an overview of how the US housing market is faring a decade after dysfunctions in housing market finance helped bring on the Great Recession that started in 2007, a useful starting point is The State of the Nation’s Housing 2017, by the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University.

Here’s the pattern of overall US housing prices: adjusted for inflation, home prices are about 30% above their level in 2000, but still below where they were at the peak of the housing bubble in 2006.

Perhaps not surprisingly, given that pattern, even ten years after the start of the financial crisis in 2007, there there are millions of Americans who are still “underwater” on their mortgages: that is, what they owe is more than what the home would sell for: “According to CoreLogic, the number of households underwater on their mortgages dropped from 4.3 million in 2015 to 3.2 million in 2016, reducing their share of all homeowners from 8.4 percent to 6.2 percent. … Despite this progress, the share of homeowners with negative equity in some markets is still more than double the national rate. For example, 16.1 percent of homeowners in the Miami metro area were underwater on their mortgages in 2016, along with 15.5 percent in Las Vegas and 12.6 percent in Chicago. At the other extreme, only 0.6 percent of owners in the San Francisco metro area had negative equity.”

Comparisons like these help to emphasize that price patterns have been VERY different across US housing markets. For example, here’s one figure comparing the rise in home prices in the ten highest-cost metro areas, compared to the lowest-cost areas and the US average. Clearly, the bubble in housing prices was much more extreme in these high-cost markets. It’s also striking that housing prices in the high-cost markets were roughly double the national average in 2000, but more like triple the national average in 2016.