MFI Quarterly Report: Typology of Southern California neighborhood home values

For many households, a home is their largest investment. In addition, for households much of their lives are lived within the neighborhood that contains their house. For these reasons, and many others,
there is naturally an interest in understanding the pattern of home value appreciation, or depreciation, across neighborhoods over time. We explore the change in home values across Southern California neighborhoods over a 50 year period.

For our analyses, we use data from 5 U.S. Censuses: 1960, 1970, 1980, 1990, 2000; as well as the American Community Survey (ACS) 5-year data in 2005-09 and 2011-15. We adopt a statistical approach that allows us to create a typology of how neighborhoods change based on their home values over time. Our analyses yielded 16 different classes of neighborhoods. In this Report, we will describe these classes of neighborhoods based on their demographic composition over this period, and where they are located spatially.

Download the full report here.