The Cheapest Housing Market in America

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jun 27, 11:45AM EDT

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The just-released April S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller U.S. National Home Price NSA Index shows a very modest recovery in the housing market compared to March, a gain of 0.5%. From April of last year, prices rose 1.3% nationwide. (These are America’s most affordable housing markets.)
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Craig J. Lazzara, managing director at S&P DJI, commented, “The ongoing recovery in home prices is broadly based. Before seasonal adjustments, prices rose in all 20 cities in April (as they had also done in March).” The research covers the country’s 20 largest metros.
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Another way Case-Shiller measures home prices begins with data from January 2000. All markets were given a value of 100 at that time. If a housing market has a price increase of 50%, its index would be 150.

In a sign of how much some home markets have risen in the past two decades, several cities currently have indexes over 400: Los Angeles at 405.47, Miami at 403.8 and San Diego at 401.9.
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Some markets have home prices that have barely risen at all, given the 100 index in 2000. One has to also take into account inflation.
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Detroit’s index is only 172.68. Why? Detroit’s population was 951,270. In 2022, the figure had fallen to 620,376. For the most part, the city is in ruins. Almost a third of the population lives below the poverty line. The personal and business tax base has been decimated.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.