The prevailing narrative around US housing affordability treats price declines as a coastal story. The data on single-family home price falls across fifteen larger US cities and counties tells a more complicated tale: the deepest damage is inland and Sun Belt, while the one market everybody expected to stay broken has quietly recovered, for reasons that have little to do with fundamentals.
Figures from the Zillow Home Value Index (ZHVI), covering seasonally adjusted mid-tier single-family homes through July, show peak-to-trough declines of between 11% and 26% across fifteen bigger markets. The data draws on millions of data points including public tax records, MLS, brokerages, local Realtor associations and off-market transactions, so it is not a small sample. These are not median prices.
Where Single-Family Home Price Falls Are Deepest
Austin leads with a –26% decline from its June 2022 peak, followed by Oakland at –24% and New Orleans at –20%. Florida contributes three counties: Lee County (Cape Coral, Fort Myers) at –18%, Sarasota County at –17%, and Collier County (Naples) at –12%. Birmingham, Alabama sits at –17%. The Dallas-Fort Worth area places two cities on the list: McKinney at –14% and Fort Worth at –11%, while several other DFW cities missed the cut-off, including Frisco (–10%), Plano (–9%) and the city of Dallas itself (–7%).
The Texas picture is worth pausing on. The region has attracted sustained business migration and population growth, which should, in theory, provide a demand floor. The complicating factor is supply. Homebuilders have targeted the area heavily, new developments have proliferated, and builders are now competing aggressively for buyers: buying down mortgage rates, offering lower price points, and throwing incentives at buyers. Existing-home sellers feel all of that. The market is not broken by demand destruction; it is pressured by supply competition, which is a different problem with a different trajectory.
Florida’s condo market, for context, is considerably weaker than the single-family segment discussed here. The single-family declines in the state are real, but the county-level condo deterioration in some Florida markets is a separate and more severe story.
Washington DC made the list at –13%, Denver at –12%, Phoenix at –11%, and Aurora, Colorado at –11%. Two markets peaked later than the mid-2022 cluster: Collier County (Naples) peaked in March 2024, and Aurora peaked in May 2024, suggesting the correction is not yet a spent force in every market.
The cut-off for inclusion was raised this month to –11% from –10%, to keep the list manageable. A year ago, when this tracking began, the threshold was –8% and the worst decline on the list was –22%. The bar keeps moving because the declines keep deepening in markets already on it.
San Francisco and the AI Distortion in the Single-Family Market
The consensus reads San Francisco as still impaired: empty offices, population loss, a reputation for dysfunction. The housing data now argues against that read, at least in the single-family segment.
San Francisco sat in fourth position on this same list a year ago, with a decline of –15%. Today it is off the list entirely, showing only a –6% drawdown from its peak. The proximate cause, per the Wolf Street analysis, is money from AI companies being deployed at scale in the local market. Anthropic is cited as one example. The effect is visible at the high end: according to ABC7 San Francisco, sales of homes over $5 million have risen 69% comparing Q1 2025 with Q1 2026. That is not a rounding error; it is a structural shift in who is buying in the city.
The population data adds another layer. According to Scripps News, citing the latest US Census data, San Francisco’s population began to rebound in 2024 and 2025. The city that was supposed to be in secular decline is adding residents again. That matters because the affordability argument in San Francisco has always been complicated by the income profile of its buyers. AI-sector wealth compresses that argument further: when a substantial cohort of buyers is largely indifferent to mortgage rates, the usual transmission mechanism from rates to prices is weakened.
Other California markets have not shared in that reprieve. Oakland is –24%, Hayward –13%, and Contra Costa County –12%. Sacramento sits at –9%, Stockton at –8%, San Jose at –6%. The Bay Area’s recovery is narrow and concentrated, not a regional uplift.
The broader national picture outside these lists is not uniformly distressed: Las Vegas is –4%, Los Angeles –4%, Nashville –4%, Boston –4%. But forty cities showing drawdowns of between 4% and 26% from recent peaks, at a time when the mainstream housing narrative fixates on affordability crises driven by high prices, is a substantial list. The affordability crisis in many of these markets is getting measurably less bad. In San Francisco, AI-sector wealth concentration may simply be replacing one affordability crisis with a different, narrower one: the $5 million sale is becoming routine precisely as the city’s general population stabilises.
