Home prices in St. Louis have barely moved in inflation-adjusted terms since 1890, rising just 6% over 134 years — the smallest gain of any major U.S. city examined in a sweeping new historical housing study. Compare that to San Diego and Los Angeles, where prices soared more than 1,000% over the same stretch, and the gap helps explain why the Gateway City has quietly remained one of the most affordable places in America to buy a home.
The finding comes from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia's Historical Housing Prices Project, an effort by researchers Ronan Lyons, Allison Shertzer, Rowena Gray, and David Agorastos to hand-collect 2.7 million real-estate listings from microfilmed newspapers across 30 U.S. cities, building a price index stretching from 1890 to 2006. As reported by MarketWatch, St. Louis stood out as the flattest market among all 30 cities studied, with Cleveland posting the second-lowest real price growth at roughly 18%. Nationally, home prices rose 354% over the same 134 years — meaning the U.S. average climbed nearly 60 times faster than St. Louis prices did.
Why St. Louis Stayed Flat While Coastal Cities Boomed
The divergence traces back largely to population. According to MarketWatch's reporting on the Fed dataset, St. Louis's population fell 38% between 1890 and 2025, dropping from roughly 452,000 residents to 278,144, per U.S. Census Bureau data. San Diego, by contrast, expanded roughly 8,600% over the same period, growing from about 16,000 residents to 1.4 million. The same report notes that manufacturing job losses further suppressed residential housing demand in St. Louis, even as geographic growth limits and population booms pushed coastal and Sun Belt prices sharply upward.
That demographic slide has continued into the present day. St. Louis's population dipped to 279,695 by mid-2024, and the city carries an estimated 25,000 vacant properties that keep a steady supply of cheap housing on the market, Hoodline reported in its coverage of the city's slide under 300,000 residents. The city once peaked at nearly one million residents in the 1950 census before decades of suburban migration hollowed out its population base, according to that same Hoodline report.
How Researchers Built a 134-Year Price History
The St. Louis figures specifically were constructed by digitizing decades of for-sale real estate classified listings printed in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the study notes, since newspaper classifieds served as the primary medium for property sales long before digital real estate platforms existed. That primary-source approach marks a significant departure from earlier long-run housing indices. Yale economist Robert Shiller's widely cited historical price index, the standard for decades, relied heavily on 1934 surveys asking homeowners to recall purchase prices from years or decades earlier — a method Shiller himself publicly characterized as provisional and imperfect, according to The Washington Post.
The new dataset also revises assumptions about the postwar era. Findings published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics show that real market rents nationally rose 60% from 1890 to 2006 without ever declining during the postwar urban expansion, even as real national home sale prices nearly quadrupled over the same period — upending earlier economic models that assumed postwar rents had fallen. The Washington Post's separate analysis of the project found that real home prices across major U.S. cities stayed essentially flat between 1890 and 1940, meaning real estate capital gains only became a major driver of American household wealth after 1970.
Cheap On Paper, Still a Squeeze at Today's Rates
None of that century-long stability erases the affordability pressure St. Louis-area buyers face right now. Buying a median-priced home in the St. Louis metro area, currently around $257,000, carries a monthly housing payment of roughly $2,100 at today's 6.4% interest rates, according to MarketWatch's analysis — a real strain even against the metro's median household income of $85,000. It's a reminder that a market can be historically cheap and still feel expensive to a buyer signing a mortgage in 2026, as high borrowing costs have pushed monthly payments higher nationwide regardless of a city's long-term price trajectory.
The contrast with booming coastal markets remains stark. Boston home prices grew by nearly 500% over the same 134 years the Fed researchers studied, while San Diego and Los Angeles topped 1,000% — figures that underscore just how unusual St. Louis's flat trajectory has been compared with nearly every other major American city in the dataset.
