Watch LA's Housing Bubble and Burst From 2001 to 2012

The housing market has "recovered" in Los Angeles only in the sense that the prices of houses are way back up—in some places, above where they were in the pre-recession days—but that process has been spread around unevenly, suggests a very cool new animated map from the Urban Institute. The map looks at new mortgages taken out between 2001 and 2012, broken down according to the ethnicities of recipients, to visualize the real estate boom and the subsequent bubble burst as it happened in the LA area (zoom out for a US-level picture).

Each dot on the map represents 20 mortgages—watch as the dots increasingly clutter up LA until 2007 hits and they start to pretty much disappear. After the bust, there are notably fewer dots representing African American and Hispanic homeowners; in 2012, the share of new mortgages held by Hispanic households was half of what it had been in 2005. The Urban Institute finds that LA is experiencing an "extreme" version of what's happening elsewhere in the country: "a strong recovery in home prices and mortgage-market activity that is limited to white and Asian homebuyers."

· A new view of the housing boom and bust [UI]
· Some LA 'Hoods Now Pricier Than They Were Pre-Recession [Curbed LA]