During the Great Recession, home values fell 30 percent. Since 2010, these top 10 cities saw the greatest gains in home values, employment, and median household income.
Denver had the most gains across all five of SmartAsset's metrics used for its rankings. Since 2010, Denver's home values rose 44.3 percent, the fifth-largest of all cities ranked. Household incomes grew the sixth-highest at 35.57 percent, and the unemployment rate dropped from 11.9 percent to 4.3 percent. Reno, Nevada had the fourth-largest decrease in their unemployment rate, 9.7 percent, closing in on pre-recession levels.
Some of those cities at the bottom of our ranking may not have been hit as hard by the recession to begin with. Chesapeake, Virginia comes last in our study partially because its unemployment rate has only changed by 1.3 percent. But it’s unemployment rate was only 6.2 percent in 2010, which was the second-lowest of the 100 cities we considered.
