Baby steps and the price of your home

Times are good again — sort of — for homeowners. The latest Case Shiller survey of home resale prices — covering January — showed every major city making gains over a year ago. In Minneapolis, housing prices are up over 12% in the last year, although they dropped slightly from December.

You’ve probably noticed something different when you received your property valuation tax statement in the last week or so; the market price of your home for 2014 likely went up.

What’s particularly fascinating is the recovery some cities have made, even though they reached the bottom of their housing market very late. Atlanta, Tampa Bay , and areas of the southeast didn’t hit bottom until last spring, while many major cities hit bottom in 2011 (Minneapolis is among those cities). Chicago didn’t reach the low point until one year ago. For many of these cities, however, while it was a long, slow fall to the depths, they’ve recovered at almost the same pace as some other cities which started their recoveries a year earlier.

Exceptions include Charlotte. When the banking industry collapsed, Charlotte — a banking city — took a hit from which it’s still staggers.

Here’s how cities compare from the current housing prices, to the prices when they reached the bottom of the housing collapse.

But, there’s still a long, long way to go. This table shows a much clearer indication of just how far some homeowners tumbled. Surprisingly, two cities are already almost back to where they were when the housing bubble burst.