News Cut: May 31, 2011 Archive

Minneapolis housing market: Busted, again

Posted at 10:52 AM on May 31, 2011 by Bob Collins (10 Comments)
Filed under: Economy

What do you have that we don't have, Seattle? If there are two cities that are joined at the hip, Seattle and Minneapolis are at the top of the list. Unless, of course, the list is the resale price of homes in the Case Shiller Index, which was released today.

There's Seattle at the top of the list -- the only city in which the price of homes went up (seasonally unadjusted) from February to March, according to the survey. And there's Minneapolis, down there at the bottom. Again.

City	Change from February
Seattle	0.1%
San Francisco	-0.1%
Los Angeles	-0.3%
Phoenix	-0.5%
Denver	-0.6%
Tampa	-0.7%
Portland	-0.7%
San Diego	-0.8%
Miami	-0.8%
Dallas	-0.8%
New York	-0.9%
Washington	-1.1%
Las Vegas	-1.1%
Boston	-1.7%
Cleveland	-1.8%
Atlanta	-1.9%
Detroit	-2.0%
Chicago	-2.4%
Charlotte	-2.4%
Minneapolis	-3.7%

That's eight straight months of decline and three straight months in which the decline was more than 3 percent from month to month. It's still not as bad as Detroit 2008 (nine straight months of price declines of more than three percent), but the Minneapolis housing market has lost its right to feel superior to just about any other city.

Minneapolis area housing prices are now back where they were in the Clinton administration, having dropped 44.9% from their 2007 highs.

Planet Money at NPR says it's only going to get worse. (10 Comments)