Alejandro Lazo writes about the decline in home prices in the Washington, DC metro area in 2008, writing that “By any measure, 2008 was a brutal year for the local real estate market, as gains made during the housing boom continued to unravel.” Except it actually wasn’t so brutal in the District itself where prices went up. Ken Baidfeld offers this chart and hypothesizes that “strong central cities” may be weathering the housing bust better than sprawling exurbs:
I think this is probably correct in broad terms. Housing overcapacity, almost by definition, exists on the far-flung fringes of metro areas. On the other hand, the ZIP-by-ZIP analysis of changes in the District doesn’t show a particularly clear pattern.
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