Authors: Jaison R. Abel and Richard Deitz

Over the past decade, the United States has seen real estate activity swing from boom to bust. But upstate New York has been largely insulated from this volatility, with metropolitan areas such as Buffalo, Rochester, and Syracuse even registering home price increases during the recession. An analysis of upstate housing markets over the most recent residential real estate cycle indicates that the region's relatively low incidence of nonprime mortgages and the better-than-average performance of these loans contributed to this stability.