Here’s some more chart porn of house prices. This chart shows the HPI for five major US cities for aproximately the last 30 years. It shows, for example, that I bought my house at the peak of a price bubble back in the 1980s. Part of the problem here is I don’t really have any idea what to compare this index to, cpi?, gdp?, interest rates?, demographics?, politics?

LA is currently the one with the highest index, it’s also the one who’s bubbling lagged the during the 1980s. Note how housing was a lousy investment during the 90s and to a limited degree the recent run up in prices looks at if it might be compensating for that. You’d see a much wider range of in the recent price runs if you had data for more areas. If you want to play with this data it’s available on this page in various formats for lots and lots of metropolitain regions, they aren’t very picky about what counts as metropolitain.