It’s been over six years since the shooting of Michael Brown brought riots to the streets of Ferguson and national attention on the small north county municipality. The end result was quite devastating to businesses and the community as a whole and many predicted Ferguson’s demise.
One year later, I did an analysis of the impact on the housing market in an article on St Louis Real Estate News in which I revealed market data showing that while the results were somewhat mixed, the housing market in Ferguson didn’t really appear to have been too negatively impacted at the time.
Now that it’s been over six years since the indecent I decided to take another look at the Ferguson housing market to see how it has fared. I created a 10 year chart for Ferguson which is shown below and reveals that not only did the shooting and riots not appear to have much of a negative effect on the housing market at the time, the Ferguson market has continued to improve at a pretty steady pace. The median home price of homes sold in Ferguson during 2014 was $34,000 and in 2019 it was $70,000, an increase of 106% in 5 years, or an average of about 21% per year! The time it took to sell a home rose a little in the year following the shooting but has pretty much been on a downward trend ever since.
So, probably to the surprise of many, the Ferguson housing market seems to be quite healthy in spite of all the city has been through!
City of Ferguson Home Prices & Sales – Past 10 Years
(click on chart for live, interactive chart)
