You’d think housing prices are rising everywhere in America, the way the current boom is discussed. And that’s nearly true, for lots of reasons: the low interest rates on mortgages; the bidding up of asset prices at a time of loose money; the desire for bigger and more distanced properties in the pandemic, and the swallowing up of thousands of tract homes by investment outfits looking to rent them.
But even with those influences, not everywhere is rising by double-digit percentages annually. People can only live—or own—in so many places at once. And so it is that in a good 10 metropolitan areas, according to realty data site CoreLogic, you’ve barely seen any price appreciation in the five years to June 2021. So, nearly no gain for existing homeowners, and no frightening increases for affordability migrants.
Read the rest of this piece at TimWFerguson.com.
Tim W. Ferguson, the former editor of Forbes’s Asia edition, writes about business, economics and society.
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