Chicago City Wire

A new Realtor.com survey forecasts more dark times for Illinois’ long troubled housing market.

Released in late November, the report projects that the Chicago-Naperville-Elgin Metropolitan Area will suffer through the worst housing market slowdown of the 100 metropolitan areas studied for the purposes of the survey.

In the Chicago area, researchers predict that the falloff will be steep enough to almost equal four times the 5.5 percent average drop projected for all the other designated spots. This comes on top of Illinois homeowners already being handcuffed by the highest overall tax burden in the country, including the second-highest property taxes in the nation.

All the latest gloom and doom comes as the Illinois Policy Institute (IPI) reports Chicago-area home prices are expected to decline by nearly 2 percent as average home prices across the rest of the country head in the opposite direction, to the tune of a 2.2 percent increase. Since the housing bubble came and went, Illinois is one of just three states where single-family homeownership is not considered a good investment.

The consequences of it all have taken a heavy toll, fueling a population decline that has festered for each of the last four years. On top of that, the Chicago metro area is the only one of the 10 largest metro areas in the nation to experience population decline in 2017.

Just as alarming as the numbers themselves are the demographics.

According to IPI, the primary group of residents heading for the border are working-age 25- to 54-year-olds, or the demographic that most figures to be in the market for a new home.

With property-taxes across Illinois on average growing nearly 60 percent faster than home values, the reason behind the exodus seems clear.

“This means declining home price appreciation could have negative spillover effects on the rest of Illinois’s economy,” IPI states. “Illinois’s weaker housing market recovery is consistent with the state’s much weaker employment growth and weaker economic growth when compared to the rest of the country.”