This Midwest city has been one of the most affordable US metros for more than 100 years

Researchers assembled an impressive dataset using historical newspapers to track housing and rent prices over the 20th century for 30 American cities.

They found that while overall, house prices have jumped more than 350% when adjusted for inflation, in some Midwestern cities, the increases are modest.

A century of data

The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia’s Historical Housing Prices Project saw researchers collect data on both home sale prices and rental prices from approximately 2.7 million newspaper real estate listings. Those listings cover 30 cities over 116 years, from 1890 to 2006.

Fed researchers recently released an updated dataset covering the years 2006 to 2024 as well, using data from the Federal Housing Finance Agency.

In 134 years, home sale prices in the U.S. have increased 354%, adjusted for inflation. If that sounds bad, in San Diego, prices have increased more than three times the average: a massive 1,225%. In Los Angeles, the figure isn’t far behind, at 1,063%.

These West Coast cities far outstrip other regions when it comes to price increases; the third-highest increase is found in Boston, which has seen prices rise 521% from 1890 to 2024.

Boston is followed by Baltimore (477%), San Francisco (413%) and New York City (357%).

In St. Louis, more than 130 years have had little effect on house prices — they’ve increased just 6%. Behind St. Louis is Cleveland, at 18% in inflation-adjusted terms.

Post-war divergence

Fed researchers say that their methodology allowed them to provide “new evidence on when the period of substantial, sustained real housing price growth began in American cities.”

That substantial growth began after 1970; from 1946 to 1970, “real housing prices rose by just 0.6 percent a year on average,” researchers say, “with no major booms or busts.”

In the housing boom of the 1920s, “nearly every city in the U.S.” responded by constructing new homes, Fed researchers say. But after World War II, “the trajectory of cities diverged.”

“Some cities, like Philadelphia and St. Louis, entered the postwar period with sufficient housing to meet much of the demand over the rest of the century,” the report notes.

The researchers found that other cities, such as Atlanta, kept up with demand by building new housing “through the 1990s.”

The conclusion: “These two groups of cities exhibit relatively flat housing price series until the 1990s,” according to the report. For the rest, construction was slowed, which meant they “experienced rapidly growing housing price levels earlier, with Los Angeles and San Francisco exhibiting this pattern by 1970.”