r/dataisbeautiful • u/goodinvestmentio • 13h ago
Home-price change in selected Chicago community areas, 2019–2025 [OC]
I made this comparison for Good Investment, which I founded because I think people buying a home deserve better appreciation analysis than a city average. My goal is to make how homes appreciate easy to understand and open to anyone.
From 2019 to 2025, Chicago home prices rose 36.3%. Hegewisch, on the far southeast edge, rose 54.4%, while the Loop rose 0.7% and the Near North Side 8.2%.
Data: FHFA and our own index, both mapped to Chicago's community-area boundaries. Where FHFA covers most of an area's homes, the area takes FHFA's figure. Most of the central city lacks that coverage, so those areas, and the city-wide line, come from our own index. Confidence intervals are bucketed into interval ranges for high, medium, and low.
Tools: Python, pandas and NumPy for the series; GeoPandas for matching geography; Matplotlib for this chart.
Full map: https://goodinvestment.io/resources/chicago-home-prices-by-neighborhood
Free resources: https://goodinvestment.io/resources
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u/aclaypool78 12h ago
Thanks for sharing, it's a nice viz to show nuance. Probably obvious, but my gut here is that there's dwindling demand for the most expensive housing. You don't have upper middle class stretching the same way as 15-20 years ago.
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u/wagon_ear 11h ago
Anecdotally I've noticed the same thing in Wisconsin, just tracking selling versus asking price. Anything under $500k is likely to go for over asking, but homes $1M and up generally do not.
I figured it's because there are fewer buyers at that price point, and they are more discerning about what they want in a home.
I am wondering what citywide or national average increases would be over this time span: what's the baseline here?
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u/Onatel 5h ago
It’s also because zoning and permitting makes construction so expensive that the only type of housing that makes sense for developers to build is luxury. So there’s plenty of supply keeping prices in check. Meanwhile there’s so growth in middle and lower income housing supply which is driving up prices.
The Loop has actually been one of the fastest growing neighborhoods by population % but it also has had a lot of office to residential conversion.
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u/lumeslice 9h ago
Yeah, the loop is chiefly- if not entirely- high rise buildings with obscene monthly assessments. No one enjoys paying more for that than what they're allowed to contribute to their IRAs
I'm surprised the loop didn't fall in pricing
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u/goodinvestmentio 8h ago
Good point, adjusted for inflation, it effectively did fall. The Loop was up just 0.7% from 2019–2025 as you can see from the chart, while consumer prices rose about 26%. That works out to about a 20% decline in real term for the properties there, before HOA fees and other ownership costs. Not a great result for those in that area.
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u/chipperclocker 6h ago edited 6h ago
Its hard to look at these things in a vacuum, however - you could say "not a great result", or you could say "the benefits of that area were known and already priced in".
People also live in their homes and neighborhoods, they aren't purely an investment vehicle. Rapidly climbing prices are signs of a rapidly changing environment. Plenty of people want to live somewhere that is already stable and nice.
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u/clockworkwarrior 6h ago
Yeah if your only metric is home price vs inflation, then sure, not great. If your metric is I love the location, pool, security, views, and not having to do any of the maintenance myself, etc, and I value that more than spending the same $x on going to restaurants or buying junk on Amazon, then it’s a no brainer and every penny is worth it.
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u/goodinvestmentio 5h ago
100% - we tell people that this is just one factor to consider among many. I personally bought a condo that scored lower on appreciation because of its location and quality of life. Going into it with that information was helpful for me so that I could make a more well informed decision.
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u/Odd_Addition3909 8h ago
When you consider the population now is just getting back to where it was in 2020 (and it’s lower than it was in 2000 and the prior 50 years before that), it’s insane home prices have changed this much
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u/Infinite_Dress_3312 6h ago
People have smaller households than they used. You have a couple with no kids living in a house that used to have 4-6 people. You have single people living in apartments that used to have 3-4. A lot of housing inventory has also been lost on the south and west sides as a result of disinvestment, which also drives up prices for what remains
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u/thechemistrychef 11h ago
As a young adult in Chicago, data checks out. Logan Square has definitely been getting gentrified. Lincoln Park and Lake View are full of Midwest transplants and college graduates so the demand from young professionals is jacking up prices too.
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u/mjones2245 8h ago
Some significant base effects that are logically obvious but not shown in the data. Would be good to include a comparison of percentage increases with average prices.
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u/goodinvestmentio 8h ago
Do you mean showing each neighborhood’s starting and ending average prices alongside the percentage change? That would help put the differences in context. We built this visual to show appreciation per dollar put into each community rather than net price change, but that's easy to add from our index and is a good idea to show two different lenses on the same underlying data.
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u/artbystorms 5h ago
The jumped up in the wealthy areas but stayed flat in the poor areas.
The rich get richer, the poor get poorer. Same as always.
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u/Designer_Yam_9584 4h ago
Not quite, most of those neighborhoods on the south and even some of the far north side ones are pretty working class. Hegewisch most certainly isn’t a wealthy area. Avalon Park is a majority working class black neighborhood and it’s up almost 50%. Problem is, unless you’re to sell sometime in the near future, higher assessments just mean your taxes go up though.
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u/Own_Proposal3827 3h ago
Wow, that's a massive assumption to make when almost all the poor areas have not enough data, and the few that don't show a similar increase in price compared to rich areas if not larger.
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u/grrgrrtigergrr 29m ago
This is flat out wrong. I live in North Park (top row, third from the right where it dips down). My neighborhood is one of the most diverse in the city and definitely not the wealthiest. The one just below me is Albany Park and it’s a very working class (primarily Hispanic) neighborhood. They both are rising quickly in price.
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u/thedoctorisout25 11h ago
Not sure if the data exists but it would be interesting to see this analysis as average mortgage payment including HOA. I live in West Loop, and while actual prices seem to have leveled out, HOAs have been going up and up so the cost of ownership on the average person has skyrocketed.
I would bet a lot of Loop places have ridiculous HOA (& parking) fees. When I was in the market it wasn’t uncommon to see $1000+ HOAs in high rises as the buildings get older, cost of maintenance and staff increases, etc. 6 unit buildings in Logan have drastically different expenses than 100 unit buildings closer to downtown (obviously)