Downtown: It’s been among the safest places to hide from the housing downturn.

Much has been made of the way the nation’s real-estate bust is affecting some American cities far more than others. But even within a single metro area, changes in housing prices can show wild variations.

And in big cities, prices in the central cores often fare the best. Far-flung suburbs — where home building exploded in recent years — have more typically gotten hammered. In between is a patchwork of established suburbs and city neighborhoods peripheral to downtown that can be all over the map in terms of price declines — or even increases.

Consider the San Francisco Bay area. Overall, prices there slid 17% in the 12 months through February, the most-recent data available, and were down 8% over the first two months of 2008 alone, making it one of the worst-performing metro areas in the country, according to the S&P/Case Shiller Home Price Indices. Yet prices within the city of San Francisco are up 0.3% over the first quarter of 2008, according to DataQuick Information Systems, a San Diego-based real-estate-data firm.

For today’s buyers, all this means that shopping for housing bargains is increasingly complicated. The best deals may be where prices have slid the most, but such areas could easily fall a good bit more before hitting bottom. Meanwhile, you’ll get few bargains if you buy a home in San Francisco or Manhattan or downtown Boston. Of course, if the housing crisis broadens, the central core areas also could see price drops.

Here’s a cheat sheet to understanding home-price patterns in some of the country’s biggest metro areas.

Chicago

It’s a mixed picture in Chicago’s downtown area. A flurry of condominium building has kept prices down on much new construction. At the same time, some established apartment buildings are still seeing buoyant prices, even as properties spend more time on the market. The Carlyle, a 1960s-era glass-and-concrete tower along the city’s prized Gold Coast neighborhood, recorded the highest price ever — $2.4 million — for one of its “C”-tier units earlier this year, for example.

Jim Kinney, president of Rubloff Residential Properties in Chicago, says “80% to 90% of the buildings along the Gold Coast achieved a record sales price in the last year.” The older buildings are often in blue-chip locations and are generally cheaper, per square foot, than new units.

Bargains abound in Chicago’s periphery. Seven miles south of the Carlyle is Bronzeville, a gentrifying community that during the housing boom was a favorite of buyers who couldn’t afford Chicago’s glitzier core. Just last month, a bank that owns a foreclosed duplex in Bronzeville dropped the asking price to just $85,000, from the January listing price of $129,900. The owners who lost the property originally paid $330,000 in November 2005, about a year before the Chicago market peaked.

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But beware: Prices may be stagnant or worse for a long time to come. “Because of the huge inventory, it will take years to recover,” says Christina Miller, a Rubloff agent, citing periphery neighborhoods such as Wicker Park, Ukrainian Village and Bucktown.

Chicago’s desirable North Shore suburbs are, for the most part, doing well. Median prices in Evanston, Wilmette and Winnetka, all hugging Lake Michigan’s shoreline, are up over the past year to varying degrees, though sales volume is down sharply, according to a Zip Code analysis by DataQuick. Sellers are receiving about 89% of the list price, according to March data from the North Shore-Barrington Association of Realtors. That’s down from about 95% at the peak of the market.

In upscale Highland Park, about 25 miles north of downtown, prices are down more than 6%. But that average is being skewed by a high number of sales of low-end homes, some forced by foreclosure.

New York

While New York’s commuter market — which includes suburban New York, New Jersey and Connecticut — is down about 8% from its peak in mid-2006, much of Manhattan continues humming along. Neighborhoods such as SoHo, the Lower East Side, Greenwich Village, Chelsea, Murray Hill, the Upper West Side and Harlem are all up in the past year, according to DataQuick’s Zip Code analysis.

Bidding wars still happen. Toni Haber, an executive vice president at Prudential Douglas Elliman, a New York City real-estate firm, says 60 people waited in line recently at an open house to view a three-bedroom apartment in Greenwich Village. The owner had four competing offers within the week, and agreed to sell for about $2.5 million — $300,000 over the asking price.

Part of the city’s strength comes from the fact that few buyers were investing in properties to flip them. Moreover, many apartment buildings in New York aren’t condominiums but co-ops, which impose financial demands on potential buyers far more rigorous than banks do — which helps keep the number of foreclosures down. In addition, foreign investors have been exploiting the weak dollar by grabbing Manhattan real estate.

One area of weakness: the Financial District in Lower Manhattan, where median prices are down, in part because of an abundance of new construction in the area.

Those areas of Brooklyn that are close to Manhattan are also holding up well. On the periphery, places like Jamaica, Queens; parts of the Bronx; and nearby New Jersey towns such as Jersey City and Hoboken are off between 3% and 14%.

Farther out, popular commuter towns like Summit and New Providence, N.J., are down at much as 16%. Pockets of suburban strength do exist, though. High-end suburbs in New York’s Westchester County such as Chappaqua are up over the past year.

Boston

Michael DiMella, managing partner at Charlesgate Realty Group, recently sold a one-bedroom condo in Boston’s South End district for $365,000, roughly $100,000 more than the owners originally paid in 2000 and about what they could have expected at the peak of the Boston real-estate market in late 2005. But the condo sat on the market for nearly four months before a buyer came along.

That sale typifies many parts of core Boston these days: flat to modestly higher prices but a longer time to sell. Prices in the city’s core are off less than 1% over the past year, according to first-quarter data from Listing Information Network, Boston’s MLS system. The real difference today is that homes are staying on the market for 111 days on average, up from 85 days in 2005.

Prices in key neighborhoods, such as Back Bay, the South End, Fenway and the Waterfront, are all up between 3% and 10%. Beacon Hill and the North End, however, are down sharply, as much as 33%. That’s partly the result of a slew of high-end properties that hit the market in 2006 and 2007 that were priced as high as $1.5 million, skewing the price data upward. Even without those sales, however, the median price would be down by double-digit amounts.

“No one is taking prices higher these days just to see if they can get it, like they used to,” Mr. DiMella says of Boston’s downtown core. “But you have to come with realistic expectations. This is a highly desirable area, and you’re not going to find a steal.”

Nearby communities are a mixed bag. Condos in suburban Brookline, one of the most desirable Zip Codes — 02445 — are down about 8%, while neighboring 02446 is up nearly 7%, for example. Among city neighborhoods, Dorchester is down across the board by as much as 25%, yet Jamaica Plain and West Roxbury are each up between 7% and 9%.

San Francisco

“I get buyers who come in thinking they’re going to get a real bargain these days because prices are down all over the country, and we just laugh,” says Caroline Werboff, an agent with San Francisco real-estate firm Hill & Co.

People want to live in San Francisco’s urban core. Median prices around the Financial District, North Beach, Telegraph Hill and Russian Hill are up — in some case strongly.

Ms. Werboff says a Russian Hill home that sold for $7.7 million in April 2004 sold again in February for $10.3 million. A newly listed house in Pacific Heights, another core neighborhood with strong price appreciation, sold three years ago for $6 million. Ms. Werboff says that the owners “will get $10 million now.”

Still, some San Francisco neighborhoods are down, particularly along the edges of the city, such as Portola, Bayview, Hunters Point and Sunset. Edward Leamer, director of the UCLA Anderson Forecast, an economic research center at the University of California Los Angeles, warns that “the housing problems won’t bypass San Francisco proper. The decline will just take more time.”

Meanwhile, both closer-in and distant suburbs are weak, too, often markedly so. On the periphery, San Mateo County and high-end Marin County are doing the best, both down more than 4% between March 2007 and 2008, according to DataQuick. Alameda and Contra Costa, across San Francisco Bay from the city and chockablock with anonymous tract housing, are down 18% and 27%, respectively. Bargains exist, but with so much inventory, prices aren’t expected to rebound quickly.

Santa Clara County, home to Silicon Valley, is down more than 9%, though pockets of strength exist in communities such Sunnyvale, Mountain View and Los Altos. Napa County, meanwhile, is one of the weakest in the region, with median prices off more than 20%.

Los Angeles

L.A. is an anomaly. No real urban core exists. The area is just a sprawling string of suburbs that run together.

And most of that sprawl is bathed in red ink. Median prices in communities throughout Riverside and San Bernardino counties — the distant, inland suburbs that are at the epicenter of the region’s subprime and foreclosure crises — are down, often sharply.

Lower-priced homes in tony Palm Springs have lost about 24%, though more-expensive homes are up slightly. Less-affluent cities such as Ontario, Chino and Rancho Cucamonga are all down between 15% and 31%. Los Angeles County, Orange County to the south and Ventura County to the north are suffering equally.

The only notable area of strength: high-end real estate. L.A.’s Westside, home to affluent neighborhoods such as Brentwood and Westwood, “tends to be more insulated because this is where people with money want to be,” says Madison Offenhauser, regional director in Los Angeles for Keller Williams Realty.

Median prices in Brentwood are up 16%. The Hollywood Hills, up 26% to a median price of more than $2.1 million. Rancho Palos Verdes and the Palos Verdes peninsula, up 17%. Parts of Newport Beach, one of Orange County’s poshest addresses, are up as much as 67% to $2.75 million. The coastal village of Laguna Beach is up 6%.

Lee Ann Canaday, owner of the Canaday Group, a Laguna Beach real-estate firm, says “almost every deal I’ve done this year” in Laguna and Newport Beach has had multiple offers.

Write to Jeff D. Opdyke at jeff.opdyke@wsj.com

How fraud led to this property changing hands 3 times as son of owner sat dead inside

The new buyers of a rundown graystone on the South Side showed up Jan. 9 to look at the house they won at a foreclosure auction. They took the plywood off the front door and went inside to make sure the utilities had been shut off. Then they called the police.

Sitting upright in the corner of a bedroom off the kitchen was a human skeleton in a red tracksuit. Next to him lay a dead dog. Neighbors told police the corpse was almost certainly Randy Johnson, a middle-age man who lived alone in the North Kenwood house.

The cause of Johnson’s death has not yet been determined, but it is just one of the mysteries about 4578 S. Oakenwald Ave. Somehow, Johnson’s house was transferred three times to new owners without anyone noticing he was inside. It’s a story involving forged deeds, a corrupt title company and a South Side family that has been under investigation for mortgage fraud.

Left holding the bag is Countrywide Home Loans, the nation’s largest mortgage lender and a company whose practices are being scrutinized by the Illinois attorney general’s office. Countrywide made mortgages of $450,000 on the property. Now it is likely to lose it all because it financed the sale of a home whose rightful owner was in no condition to sell.

The intrigue surrounding the Oakenwald house offers a glimpse into the strange and murky world of mortgage fraud. Lenders duped into making loans have every incentive to unload the properties, and almost none to blow the whistle on wrongdoers. If borrowers or government watchdogs fail to cry foul, the same home can change hands again and again before anyone is the wiser.

“They foreclose. They don’t care. They just foreclose,” said Daniel Lindsey, a supervisory attorney with the Legal Assistance Foundation of Metropolitan Chicago. Most of the time, he said, the foreclosures go through because no one with an interest has the legal firepower to stop them.

As lenders prepare to move an unprecedented number of troubled properties off their books, it’s buyer beware with a vengeance. Illinois Atty. Gen. Lisa Madigan has called it a looming crisis.

Lenders filed 91,000 foreclosures in Illinois last year, a number expected to go higher in 2008. If fraud was involved in only a small percentage of those loans, it still translates into thousands of homes with troubled histories that could come back to haunt lenders, owners and entire neighborhoods.

Last week, Countrywide vacated the recent sale of 4578 S. Oakenwald and returned the buyer’s money. That happened only after Cook County officials announced they would fight to put the house back in the Johnson family’s name.

Known in neighborhood

All the longtime neighbors at the south end of Oakenwald Avenue knew Randy Johnson and his mother, Arrellia Johnson.

Randy Johnson had never been quite normal, they said. He was standoffish, almost aloof as a child. They said he didn’t work except for tinkering with cars in front of his house, and as he got older he became reclusive.

There were “Keep Out” and “Private Property” signs posted all over his small back yard, which was crowded with six city garbage cans. A metal shopping cart blocked the concrete stairs to the basement door, and a collection of jury-rigged chains and padlocks held outside doors shut.

Oakenwald neighbor Craig Cox remembers that it took years for Johnson to respond to him when he waved. Scott Clayton, whose garage faced Johnson’s across the alley, recalled a few run-ins with him.

One time Johnson complained when Clayton was clearing snow from his garage door and piling it next to a brick wall that served as Johnson’s back fence. Clayton didn’t understand why until later, when he saw Johnson climbing over the brick wall because his gate was broken.

Whatever his quirks, Johnson was a neighborhood fixture, sitting on his front stoop in a butterfly chair with his dog, Prince, beside him. He loved animals and adopted strays.

Things got worse for Johnson, neighbors say, after his family began to fall apart. One sister, Joe Ann Harris, died in 1996. Another sister, Bobbiette, moved to the East Coast.

Then his mother died in 2001, and Johnson was left alone in the three-story house.

In November 2005, Johnson was arrested for brandishing a “short sword” when a female friend wanted to go home, police records show. He didn’t stop her, but police charged him with aggravated assault. He posted bond and was ordered to return for a court date in early December 2005. Johnson never showed up, records show, and his bond was forfeited.

When Johnson hadn’t appeared outside for weeks in early 2006, neighbors called the city’s non-emergency number asking for well-being checks, fearing he might have had an accident. Firefighters broke down the front door and searched but didn’t locate Johnson. His death remains under investigation.

Red flags missed

Someone without Johnson’s best interest at heart also noticed his absence.

In October 2006, a deed was filed with the Cook County recorder of deeds indicating Johnson’s mother, Arrellia Johnson, had transferred the house to a woman named Rhonda Evans.
The deed appeared to have been drawn up 10 years earlier, in 1996, when Arrellia Johnson was still alive, which should have been a red flag that something unusual was going on, real estate attorneys say. The deed bears the signature and notary seal of Mae Evans, who is Rhonda Evans’ mother, Missouri birth records show.

Mae Evans also is the mother of Edwin Evans, a convicted rapist and armed robber, who was indicted on mortgage fraud in September. (See accompanying story.)

The deed is a “forgery and fraudulent,” according to a motion filed in Chancery Court by Cook County Public Administrator Michael Bender. Bender’s office represents the estates of people who die without wills in Cook County.

To back up the forgery claim, Bender noted that the purported 1996 deed was drawn up on the stationery of Cook County Recorder Eugene Moore, which is not possible because Moore did not take office until 1999. Jesse White was recorder of deeds in 1996.

Phony ’straw buyer’

That discrepancy did not stop the warranty deed from being recorded. Rhonda Evans then sold the house to Donald Franklin of Harvey for $450,000 in late January 2007, documents show.

On the same day, Franklin took out a $360,000 first mortgage and a $90,000 second mortgage from Countrywide — 100 percent financing.

Franklin was a “fraudulent straw buyer,” who was working with the Evanses, according to Bender’s motion. The title company that handled the closing, TriStar Title, has had its Illinois license revoked and is under investigation for mortgage fraud in Missouri and Illinois. The company has gone out of business.

Franklin never moved into the house. The next month, he stopped making mortgage payments. Countrywide filed a motion to foreclose on the property May 29, documents in the case show. Tribune efforts to locate Franklin were unsuccessful.

Then Countrywide’s attorneys asked the judge to speed things up because the house appeared to not be lived in, a special status under Illinois law known as “non-residential,” documents show. Judge Carolyn Quinn granted the motion, a decision that cut a month off the usual seven-month period an owner would have had to reclaim the property.

In January, Countrywide held an auction for 4578 S. Oakenwald and accepted a bid of $93,000. It was more than a 75 percent discount from the original mortgage debt and one-third what a nearby vacant house sold for a few months earlier.

Still, the sale needed a judge’s final approval, which usually comes about six weeks after an auction. Before that happened, the Cook County public administrator stepped into the case, and Countrywide decided to walk away from the sale.

Countrywide, which is based in Calabasas, Calif., declined repeated requests for comment.

The public administrator’s office has said it will open an estate in the name of Arrellia Johnson, the last person who held legitimate title to the house, and already is searching for her heirs. Ultimately, the house will be sold and the proceeds split among those who are legally entitled to a share.

A lengthy process

Chicago attorney Arthur Rosenson knows how hard it is to unravel a fraudulent mortgage transaction.

For a year now, he has been fighting to undo another back-dated deed with Rhonda Evans’ name on it that was filed in October 2006, the same month the Johnson house was transferred.
Rosenson’s client is Mary Fredericks, an elderly Chicago woman who moved into assisted living, leaving her longtime home at 9220 S. Union Ave. unoccupied. Her niece noticed something wrong when she checked on Fredericks’ house and saw someone had changed the locks with her aunt’s belongings still inside.

The niece called the Chicago Bar Association for help, and the group referred her to Rosenson, who is working on the case for a reduced fee.

Rosenson quickly figured out that Fredericks had never met Evans, and he asked Chancery Court Judge Peter Flynn to declare Fredericks’ signature on the deed a forgery. The judge did so in November.
Buyer called a victim

But the attorney is still trying to get title to the house back in his client’s name. The case is complicated by the fact that two months after the deed to Evans was recorded, Evans transferred title to Ricky Walker of Chicago.

Walker then took out a $123,000 mortgage from BNC Mortgage, the subprime-lending arm of investment house Lehman Brothers. Lehman shuttered BNC in August.

Walker is arguing he is a victim too. He bought the house in good faith, fixed it up and has rented it to a tenant, said his attorney, Robert Habib.

“Ricky is legitimate, and that’s one reason why the judge entered the order putting him back on the title. Ricky only met Rhonda Evans once, at the closing,” Habib said.

Next week, Flynn will set a schedule to hear arguments about who really owns 9220 S. Union.

Rosenson is confident Fredericks will eventually win because the original transfer was fraudulent.

“The system works. Within a year, we achieved a fair amount. It will take another few months to clean it up completely,” Rosenson said. “We didn’t beat them, of course, because by the time we found them, they had taken out the loan. Right now there is a cloud on the title. No third party would feel comfortable buying the home right now.”

It could take many more months before the public administrator’s office gets to the same point with the Johnson home. Already, investigators have located two possible grandsons of Arrellia Johnson, both of them in prison. The search for other heirs continues.

As for Randy Johnson, who would have turned 48 in December, he will benefit in a way. The public administrator will bury him privately in the South Side cemetery close to where his mother is interred.

It’s not exactly a happy ending, Cook County officials say, but it is better than the pauper’s grave that likely would have awaited him otherwise.

By Susan Chandler. Tribune reporter David Jackson contributed to this report | Tribune Reporter

schandler@tribune.com