A New View of the Housing Boom and Bust

The economic collapse of the Great Recession was driven in large part by the housing market. Urban's researchers found a new way to explore the boom and bust of the housing market by tapping into Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data. They sliced the data by race, place, and time, giving a multidimensional look at the housing market between 2000 and 2013.

Using a dot-density approach allowed us to tell several stories at once. For instance, there is the story of residential segregation, especially in places like Los Angeles and Washington, DC. There's also the story of the boom and bust of America's manufacturing cities, especially in Detroit, where the inner city core became completely hollow during the recession as new homebuyers were fleeing the city.