Despite San Francisco's low unemployment rate and skyrocketing real estate prices, a new study shows that the economic recovery hasn't touched everyone in the city.
While home values have spiked in white and Asian American communities, they still haven't rebounded from the housing bust in the region's African American and Latino neighborhoods.
The study released Monday by real estate website Zillow tells the story of the widening wealth gap through the changing demographics and home values in the metropolitan area, which includes San Mateo, Marin, Alameda and Contra Costa counties.
Since the burst of the housing bubble around 2007 and the subsequent recession, median home prices have dropped 24 percent in the predominantly Latino neighborhoods and 12 percent in African American enclaves, according to Zillow's study.
Meanwhile, homes in predominantly white neighborhoods jumped by 13 percent and by 9 percent in Asian ones.
The region's median household income for whites ($95,000) and Asian Americans ($90,000) is more than twice as high as those of African Americans ($40,000) and much higher than Latinos ($56,000), according to Zillow.
"As a city like San Francisco become more affluent, there is a widening gap between the haves and the have-nots," said Skylar Olsen, a senior economist with Zillow. "The bubble was a much bigger problem in low-income communities."
Nationally, housing values dropped 18 percent in African American neighborhoods, 24 percent in Latino ones and 8 percent in predominantly white communities from 2007 to 2013, according to the study. Values rose nearly 10 percent in Asian communities, in large part because they were concentrated mostly in hot housing markets along the West Coast, according to the survey's authors.
The study found that home values in both black and Hispanic communities nationwide have much further to climb before getting back to peak levels before the crash, while values in white and Asian neighborhoods have returned or nearly returned to peak levels.
"While many of the disparities between the experiences of white communities and minority communities during the housing boom and bust can be explained by plain differences in finances and geography, it's clear that the housing playing field remains strikingly unequal in this country," said Zillow chief economist Stan Humphries.
Analysts say the difference is that the subprime mortgage crisis and predatory lending practices that helped trigger the housing crash affected black and Latino communities disproportionately.
"The dynamics of the boom and bust were felt more in those communities," said Carolina K. Reid, an assistant professor in the department of city and regional planning at UC Berkeley.
Often, when a house is foreclosed on, it drags down home values in the whole neighborhood, Reid said. Prices could stabilize temporarily if a speculator were to buy the distressed property, but that often doesn't pick up the prices of the neighborhood.
It remains harder for African Americans and Latinos to break into the housing market.
In 2013, 27.6 percent of blacks and 21.9 percent of Hispanics nationally who applied for a conventional mortgage were denied, compared with 10.4 percent of white and 13.3 percent of Asian applicants, Zillow found.
Locally, 21 percent of African Americans and 16.4 percent of Latinos who applied were denied, compared with 12.8 percent of Asians and 7.2 percent of white applicants, the study found.
All of these factors are helping to reshape this into a region that is more white and Asian, Olsen said.
More African Americans and Latinos are leaving the area than are moving in, according to 2013 figures analyzed by Zillow. In 2013, the region gained 3,992 Asian and 204 white residents while it lost 1,478 Latinos and 255 African Americans.
©2015 San Francisco Chronicle. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency
