Orange County, Calif., Housing Market Was Ugly For Much of 1990s.(Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News)

Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News, January, 2000 by Hieger, Jennifer

Dec. 30--Ugly. That's about the only way to describe the Orange County housing market during much of the 1990s.

The long, gut-wrenching slide that began in 1990 and lasted about six years caught nearly everyone off-guard. A temporary downturn might have been predictable -- but not this.

Buyers, who had jumped into the market assuming prices would go nowhere but up, found they were badly mistaken. A typical buyer who paid $240,000 for a house just before the trouble began saw that investment shrink by $47,000 before prices finally bottomed out.

Now, on the eve of a new decade, a new millennium even, the pain is almost gone but not forgotten.

"It was a reckoning," said Pat Veling, a housing analyst in Fullerton.

Over the past...

Read the rest of this article with a Free Trial at HighBeam Research.

Premium Content Partnership | HighBeam Research provides an in-depth online archive library of reference works.