In Rising Home Values from 2010 to 2024, Geographic Divides Endure

Since the housing crash sparked the Great Recession almost 20 years ago, home values have been an uneven concern for Americans. As high home prices are felt in more places and younger generations struggle to break into the housing market, concern is widespread today.

The median age of a first-time homebuyer recently hit 40, a historic high, according to the National Association of Realtors. In late June, The Wall Street Journal article “See How Owning a Home Is Getting More Expensive in Every Way” detailed the list of rising costs, noting that housing sales are down for the fourth year in a row.

Now, the federal government is taking steps to address housing affordability. This week, Congress overwhelmingly passed the “21st Century ROAD to Housing Act,” with provisions to increase the housing supply and restrict Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes. As of this writing, President Trump canceled the signing of the bipartisan bill.

Meanwhile, a new American Communities Project analysis of median home prices from the American Community Surveys in 2024 and 2010 shows how differently communities have been experiencing price increases over the past 15-plus years. This more granular, community-level analysis illustrates how the long-running geographic and economic divides in housing endure.

Home Prices Now

In 2024, the affluent, multicultural Urban Suburbs ringing cities were the only community type where the median home price crossed the $400,000 threshold, at $417,300. It may seem surprising that the median home price in the Urban Suburbs was higher than the Big Cities, which hold some of the most expensive real estate in the country. Importantly, the 48 Big City counties also tend to have lower-cost neighborhoods and have long been characterized by stratification. Moveover, heavily populated, high-income Urban Suburbs include uber affluent counties like Westchester in New York and Montgomery in Maryland.

LDS Enclaves, a group of 39 Mormon-dominated communities in Utah and Idaho, came in third with a median home price around $369,000, showing a hot and concentrated market as opposed to expansive national wealth. Some of this may be due to the burgeoning “Silicon Slopes” technology ecosystem, expanding suburbs around Salt Lake City, and rapid growth of the population of those places. Growing population plus a lack of building tend to lead to higher prices. Rounding out the top four but not quite as hot were the affluent Exurbs on the outskirts of cities, with a median home price of about $350,000.

At the other end of the spectrum, seven rural community types had median home values below $200,000. The two lowest were the African American South with a median home price at $122,100 and the Aging Farmlands at $142,600. The relatively low median home value of the Aging Farmlands may be a head-scratcher in some ways. While some of the farmlands in the Central and Great Plains have been sought out and bought up, other lands may not be as valuable.

The disparities between different types of communities can measured in other ways. A case in point, Urban Suburbs had a median home price that was 3.4 times greater than the African American South — these 272 rural, often underinvested counties where the median Black population is 43%, but racial separation remains visible in daily life.

County Standouts

At the same time, some resort and coastal counties tower over the community-type trends:

• Teton County, Wyoming (Exurb), at $1.63 million, fueled by Jackson Hole;
• Nantucket County, Massachusetts (Exurb), at $1.59 million; and
• Bay Area counties in California: San Mateo at $1.56 million (Urban Suburb); Marin at $1.51 million (Urban Suburb); Santa Clara at $1.49 million (Big City); and San Francisco at $1.39 million (Big City).

A couple of small and struggling counties posted median home prices much below the median for their type: Stonewall County, Texas (Aging Farmland), at $48,600; and McDowell County, West Virginia (Evangelical Hub), at $50,000.

As these outliers show, there was a 33.6x gap between the counties considered most and least expensive.

Mapping County and National Changes Over Time

Major divides show up in the 15-year trend in median home prices, from 2010 to 2024, capturing the seismic effects of the Great Recession, the energy boom, and the Covid-19 pandemic.

Individually, the biggest growth counties were propelled by the energy boom, and not in places with dense populations, like the Big Cities or Urban Suburbs. Every county in the top 10 for real growth in median home prices was in the Bakken Shale in North Dakota and Montana or Permian Basin in West Texas. For example, Billings County, North Dakota (Aging Farmland), grew at a rate of 189% and McKenzie County, North Dakota (Exurb), grew 181%; Reeves County, Texas (Hispanic Center), increased 161% and Winkler County, Texas (Hispanic Center), 165%.

On the national level, real home values rose more modestly. Median real growth across counties was 17.9%. This was real (inflation-adjusted) growth, after removing the ~44% CPI inflation between 2010 and 2024.

About 1 in 7 counties, 14.5%, lost real value. A smaller group of counties saw home values fail to keep pace with inflation; they were concentrated in Native American Lands, Graying America, and rural agricultural areas experiencing population decline, including Aging Farmlands.

Community Type Changes

Among the ACP’s 15 community types, the most surprising finding may be how the challenge of rising home prices crosses so many lines. It’s not only a story for urban America but also for many rural communities. Similarly, it’s not just a problem for wealthy communities but for less wealthy ones as well.

For example, the mostly rural, middle-income LDS Enclaves were far and away the consistent leader, with a 57% increase in real median home price, adjusted for inflation. This increase was fairly evenly spread across the 39 counties rather than fueled by a few outliers.

Native American Lands’s real median home price jumped 39%. The rise wasn’t felt across the board but boosted by a few counties as others stagnated or declined. For example, Aleutians West Census Area, Alaska, skyrocketed 84.9% and Bennett County, South Dakota, 80.6%. At the other end, Kusilvak Census Area, Alaska, plunged 45.3% and Apache County, Arizona, 44.5%. In that time, Nome Census Area, Alaska, inched up 1.5%.

Two of the most diverse community types, Hispanic Centers and Big Cities, also showed real median home prices rising above 30%. Hispanic Centers, mostly lower-income, rural counties in Florida and Southwest, increased 36.3% while Big Cities moved up 31.5%.

A somewhat surprising development in this analysis: the median home price in the affluent Urban Suburbs climbed just 11% — perhaps a sign of those markets’ maturity with less room for growth and maxed out prices.

The African American South remained the weakest performer, with a real median home price rising just 7%. That the African American South also had the lowest median home value ($122,100) of any type in 2024 underscores that this is a persistent, structural pattern.