During the past three years, home prices grew in the beer-guzzling heartland and fell in the wine-sipping coastal states.
If you're a beef-eating, beer-guzzling, pick-up driving resident of heartland America, there's a good chance you escaped the housing bust. But pesto-chomping, chardonnay-sipping, hybrid-driving city-slickers were probably out of luck.
Over the past three years, 23 states recorded home price gains in the majority of their metro areas, according to analytics firm Fiserv. And where were most of those gainers? In much of the so-called heartland: the South, the Plains and most of the non-coastal West.
Meanwhile, the 16 states that posted declines were led by much of New England and the Northeast, plus California, Florida, Nevada and Arizona.
Most telling, however, was that the 12 remaining states — those that posted mixed results in their metro areas — were found in every region of America.
And even in the mixed results states, such as New York, the bust hit "blue" metro areas, like New York City and Long Island (both down 21.7%), and spared "red" upstate cities. Buffalo prices grew 8.3%, Syracuse climbed 8.4%, Utica gained 10.4%, and Binghamton was up 17.7%.
The states where metro markets rose generally share two characteristics, according to Mark Fleming, chief economist for First American CoreLogic: low prices and open space.
