Southern California’s housing market has spent the last decade pulling a neat little trick: inland counties are racking up the biggest percentage gains while coastal areas still wear the region’s highest price tags like a very expensive badge of honor. That split is reshaping what “affordable” means and forcing buyers to rethink where they can actually land a home.
Columnist Jonathan Lansner at The San Diego Union-Tribune dug into ATTOM homebuying data through Sept. 30, comparing all six Southern California counties over a full decade to see where prices climbed the fastest. His breakdown shows the biggest percentage jumps cropping up inland rather than along the coast, and comes with an interactive tool that lets readers see the decade-long winners and laggards by county.
What the San Diego analysis found
A significant part of the story hinges on basic math. In places like the Inland Empire, home prices started from a lower base, so each dollar added translates into a much larger percentage gain. Coastal counties, by contrast, still dominate when you look at raw dollars, even if their percentage growth looks tamer on paper.
To put it in perspective, Zillow data cited by the Los Angeles Times pegged the six-county average home value at approximately $860,000 as of this September. So yes, inland areas may be posting flashier percentage gains, but that does not exactly make the coast a bargain. Looking at both percentage change and absolute price is key to understanding how affordable (or not) each county really feels to buyers…