How have home values rippled across Los Angeles since the dot-com era? This map animates 274 LA County ZIP codes from 2000 through 2026 using Zillow’s typical home value (ZHVI). Press Play, drag the slider, or hover any ZIP to see its year-by-year arc and the neighborhood it covers.
For context, this page also includes two long-run companion charts that pre-date Zillow’s ZIP-level coverage: Robert Shiller’s US home-price series back to 1890, and the Case-Shiller LA Metro index back to 1987.
blackmad/neighborhoods.)LXXRSA)
via FRED — monthly LA-metro repeat-sales index since January
1987.To refresh the data, run
Rscript scripts/la_heatmap_data.R.
Before zooming into the map: how does the period we’re animating fit into the long arc of US housing? There is no LA-neighborhood-level data going back a century — that resolution only exists from the late 1990s on. But we can stitch in two long-run series that reach much further back.
This is the series Robert Shiller assembled for Irrational Exuberance — a US-wide home-price index in real (inflation-adjusted) terms, normalized so that 1890 = 100. The flat century from 1890 to the late 1990s is famous: until the dot-com era, US homes did not get more expensive in real terms, on average. Then the 2000s and 2020s happened.
For the entire 20th century, US home prices barely budged in inflation-adjusted terms. Two structural breaks dominate everything else: the 2000s housing bubble (peak in 2006, ~85% above the long-run baseline) and the post-COVID surge (an even higher peak around 2022). The dashed horizontal line marks the 1890 level — everything above it is “more expensive than 1890” in real terms.
For something LA-specific that pre-dates Zillow’s 2000 start, the canonical series is the Case-Shiller LA Metro repeat-sales index. It begins in January 1987 (the index is normalized to January 2000 = 100).
LA tells the same story as the nation, only louder: a late-80s peak (around 1990), a long slide through the early 90s, the 2000s bubble (peak 2006, sharp 2008 crash), and an aggressive post-COVID climb that has just started to retrace.
ZIP-, tract-, and neighborhood-level price indexes require a large enough volume of repeat home sales (or appraisal-model inputs) to be statistically meaningful in each tiny geography. That data really only exists from the late 1990s onward, when MLS records and computational hedonic/repeat-sales models like Zillow’s ZHVI made it feasible to estimate a typical home value for every ZIP, every month. Pre-1996, the best you can do for LA is a single metro-wide line. Pre-1987, only the national series exists.
The animated map below, then, is the finest spatial resolution for which a long time series is possible.
The map above shows levels. The chart below shows growth: each line is one ZIP code, indexed to its 2000 value. Hover to find a specific area.
Methodology notes. ZHVI is a smoothed, seasonally adjusted estimate of typical home value for the middle 33% to 67% of the market for a given region. It is not a transaction-based median sale price; it includes the full housing stock (condo/SFR), so values reflect the typical home rather than what is currently changing hands. Comparisons across years on a single ZIP are robust; comparisons across ZIPs reflect both market dynamics and the underlying composition of housing.
For median sale prices and price-per-square-foot at the neighborhood level, see LA Neighborhoods: Price per Square Foot.