The Los Angeles County median housing price hit $475,000 in May, according to data provided to us by PropertyShark, which means it's now surpassed the median for December 2007, the month the Great Recession officially began. (CoreLogic, another data tracking firm, put the LA County median for resales [no new construction] at $510,000 for May.) Housing prices had been trending downward for a few months by then; LA hit its peak in late 2006 and early 2007 at about $550,000. The number of sales, meanwhile, has stayed about flat for the past year and a half, suggesting no growth in the actual pool of buyers.
And as we saw in earlier data from PropertyShark, the countywide gains look way different when they're broken down by neighborhoods. Some areas have already well surpassed their bubble peaks—places like the San Gabriel Valley, flooded with Chinese cash, or the Westside, which has welcomed a glut of high-paid tech workers in the past couple years. Other rich areas have seen nice, healthy gains too, while poor areas have actually lost housing value. Middle-class areas have been stagnant or fallen just a bit. That all tracks with how the rebound from the recession has gone in general: the rich have come back as strong as ever, while the rest of the US still struggles.
· Los Angeles Housing Prices Have Shot Up More Than Any Other US City's Since 2000 [Curbed LA]
· Mapping Los Angeles's Shockingly Unequal Changes in Housing Prices Over the Last 10 Years [Curbed LA]
· Some LA 'Hoods Now Pricier Than They Were Pre-Recession [Curbed LA]
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