Chicago home prices are spiking. Here's how they've changed in 25 years.
By Dennis Rodkin
Home values in Chicago have doubled over the last 25 years, but nationwide they’ve more than tripled and in some coastal cities they’ve quadrupled, according to data from a closely watched index of the nation’s housing market.
“I’m not surprised,” said Bryan Bomba, an @properties Christie’s International Real Estate agent in the western suburbs who specializes in Hinsdale. “Chicago has always been sort of Steady Eddie. Do people come here for a tech scene or the water or the investment value of real estate? Or are they here because their family is here and they have a great job?”
Like several agents Crain’s spoke to, Bomba said Chicago’s low price growth, while it might disappoint homeowners who see what their friends and relations in higher-flying housing markets are getting for their homes, is cause for confidence. That’s largely because it means affordability isn’t running away.
“You can afford to live so much better in Chicago,” said Karen Ranquist, a Jameson Sotheby’s International Real Estate agent whose work is mostly in the neighborhood cluster that includes West Town, Wicker Park and Bucktown. “Life is good in Chicago, and people want to live here” despite home appreciation not boosting their financial position the way it might in places where home values have soared over the years.
The latest data from the S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller Indices, released March 25, covers not only home price growth in the past year, which Crain’s reported separately, but price growth over the past quarter-century. Developed by economists Karl Case and Robert Schiller, the index measures price growth via repeat sales of the same home over time. It uses January 2000 as a baseline, tracking monthly changes since that time.
25 years of home values in 20 major metros
Home values in Chicago have doubled in the past quarter-century, according to the S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller Indices, but nationwide they've more than tripled in that time, and in some cities quadrupled. The January 2025 index shows the market's level as measured from a January 2000 baseline of 100.
As the chart shows, the January index for Chicago was 211.23, or a little more than double the January 2000 baseline. In Miami, Los Angeles and San Diego, the index is in the 400s, meaning prices in those coastal cities are more than four times what they were as the 21st century dawned.
Nationwide, the index was at 323.54, meaning home prices have tripled and then some in the 21st century. Of the 20 major cities the index tracks, Chicago has had less price growth in the past 25 years than all but Cleveland and Detroit, where prices haven’t yet doubled.
This long-term growth picture is nearly the opposite of the short term. As Crain’s reported in the monthly roundup of data, Chicago’s home prices in January compared to a year ago were up by more than all the major metros but New York. It’s been true for several months, and it's happening in part because cities like Phoenix and Tampa saw such fizzy price growth during the pandemic housing boom — rising by more than 30% in some months — that their hangover inevitably came, and Chicago kept rolling.
It's important to note that the index is a blanket figure for the vast metropolitan area’s overall housing stock. Individual pockets have overperformed or underperformed.
Bronzeville is an example of an overperformer. Now a place where homes routinely sell in the $800,000 and $900,000 range and sometimes top $1 million, Bronzeville “wasn’t the place anyone expected to see that” in 2000, says Michelle Browne, an @properties Christie’s International Real Estate agent who focuses on Bronzeville and other South Side neighborhoods.
As Crain’s detailed in a 2022 podcast series, Bronzeville’s potential was unlocked by demolition of several 20th-century Chicago Housing Authority developments and mushrooming new construction of houses, condos and apartments by developers, many of them from the neighborhood, who envisioned its future as the next great Chicago neighborhood.
“There was a lot of hope for Bronzeville” back then, Browne says, but “there had to be some pioneering people to get it going.”
Similarly, Ranquist notes, 25 years ago in the neighborhoods where she works, “there were people who wouldn’t go west of Western,” and now Humboldt Park is one of the city’s most happening housing markets.
All of those increases, as well as long-term declines in home values in the south Cook County suburbs following the disappearance of industrial jobs in the region, figure into the index’s single number for the Chicago region.
Twenty-five years spans at least three big hits to the nation’s economy and its housing markets: the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the financial crisis of 2007-08, and the COVID-19 pandemic. In at least the latter two cases, “Chicago seemed to take longer to come up out of it,” says Tim Sheahan, a Compass agent representing mostly new construction in the city.
The subprime real estate crisis that led to a tidal wave of foreclosures was particularly harsh in Chicago, and later COVID and a crime wave hit downtown Chicago so hard that its condo markets are still struggling to regain their equilibrium, price-wise.
Another factor undermining home price growth is the Chicago area’s long-term loss of population, which at last turned up slightly in the most recent report from the U.S. Census Bureau.
Whether it’s because of the weather, the politics or the taxes, Chicago isn’t growing at the pace of cities in warm states. That puts some slack in the demand for housing, and thus in price growth.
“You need a growing city for prices to grow,” Sheahan says.
Dennis Rodkin is a senior reporter covering residential real estate for Crain’s Chicago Business. He joined Crain’s in 2014 and has been covering real estate in Chicago since 1991.