Prices also tumbled below 1989 levels in neighborhoods in Palmdale, Hemet, Barstow, Desert Hot Springs, Victorville, Highland, Santa Ana and Oxnard, according to DataQuick. Several other inland communities, including parts of Moreno Valley, Banning and Rialto, had median prices that were only slightly above 1989 levels and below the April 1990 median.
The median price is the point at which half the homes sell for more and half for less.
Losing two decades' worth of gains in a single downturn "has never happened," said UCLA economist Edward Leamer, who has studied local areas during booms and busts. "You're seeing something that's abnormal."
What's abnormal this time, Leamer and other analysts said, is the easy credit that pumped up demand and inflated home prices in those communities to unprecedented highs.
Armed with risky subprime mortgages and fearful of being priced out of the market forever, buyers flocked to the outer reaches of the Antelope Valley and Victor Valley. Those distant suburbs became the only option when areas closer to job centers soared out of reach, said John Husing, an economist who specializes in the Inland Empire.
"The families who were buying out there were the ones who couldn't get in anywhere else," Husing said. "They were paying stupid prices."
They were among the first to default when the economy crumbled, bringing real estate prices crashing down. Demand for those far-flung houses vanished when prices dropped for homes closer to workplaces. Riverside and San Bernardino counties have registered more defaults and foreclosures per capita during this downturn than other Southern California counties, according to ForeclosureRadar, an online seller of default data.
These foreclosures, sold at cut-rate prices by banks eager to be rid of them, represent the bulk of the sales activity in some communities.
In the 1990s housing bust, "you had a foreclosure here, a foreclosure there. You did not have almost entire neighborhoods being foreclosed," UCLA's Leamer said.
The fire sales have stoked demand. In April, 237 homes sold in Beatrice's ZIP Code, more than in any other area in Southern California. Most of those properties were foreclosed.
Stable homeowners such as Patricia Hynes have watched their hard-won equity rise and fall, leaving them roughly where they started a generation ago.
