Housing Prices in Washington, D.C.

Little life updates: I moved to D.C. a few months ago, quit my old job, started working for the Treasury (specifically in benefits), and am now apartment hunting once again!

In the course of apartment hunting, I started to realize just how much gentrification has occurred across the city over the last few decades. I wanted to visualize home prices in DC and how that’s changed over time.

A few notes: unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find a great source for neighborhood-level home prices prior to 5-10 years ago. The best data came from The Federal Housing Finance Agency which charts a Housing Price Index (HPI) for census tracts starting in 1978. Their HPI seems to be calculated based off of collected single-family home mortgages, indexed against their initial prices. There was also a significant amount of missing data, which I imputed based off local averages. So, if there’s a better dataset out there, would love to hear about it!

Anyway - hope this animation is enlightening :)

Love,

Robin