Bay Area Sees Patchwork Recovery From Housing Crash
The Bay Area’s recovery from the housing crash is proceeding ZIP code by ZIP code, with only a few upscale communities nearing the values they saw before the bubble popped five years ago.
It may take another three to five years for the entire region to return to a healthy housing market, one that sees prices go up every year in most areas, and has far fewer foreclosures.
According to an analysis by this newspaper of home values by ZIP code, with higher priced homes, such as the core of Silicon Valley and parts of San Francisco, have recovered much of the home equity lost in the crash. The data is for all types of homes: single-family, condos and townhouses. But neighborhoods with low-cost homes, especially those in parts of Alameda and Contra Costa counties, are still far below peak values, hurt by the waves of foreclosures that struck those areas.
The analysis of ZIP code data supplied by the online real estate site Zillow used April 2006 as the approximate peak in Bay Area home values, although different communities reached their highest levels a bit before or after that. After that, values gradually declined until crashing in late 2007.