Downturns are not new to New York City real estate and a study released yesterday by the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy at New York University found that the city "appears to be highly resilient, recovering from troubled times in a way that many other, older, industrial cities have not been able to."

In looking at data over the past four decades, encompassing "some of the darkest days in the City's modern history," the report found that "the City's price gains far surpassed the losses. Social welfare indicators improved: crime rates fell, great progress was made in school performance, and poverty and unemployment rates improved in every borough."

But it noted also that "predicting which neighborhoods will do well or will fare poorly is very difficult" and that "price trends during past downturns are not reliable predictors of price trends in future downturns."

Between 1974 and 1980, the report said, prices declined by 12.4 percent citywide; between 1980 and 1989, prices increased by 152 percent; from 1989 to 1996, prices dropped by 29.3 percent; from 1996 to 2006, the City's latest boom, housing prices increased by 124 percent.

"On average, despite very high price levels, housing prices in the City," according to the study, "have not risen as much over the past two decades as they have around the country:in the most recent upturn, New York's impressive growth of 124 percent was dwarfed by growth of 189 percent nationwide. Of Course, the City and national averages obscure a lot of variation. Take, for example, the tremendous growth in Upper Manhattan during this last period of prosperity. In East Harlem, prices grew by 500 percent; in Morningside Heights, prices grew by 399 percent; and in Washington Heights, prices grew by 333 percent."

The report noted that over the entire period surveyed, from 1974 to 2006, "home prices in New York City grew by 250 percent."

"City investment is correlated with greater stability in poor neighborhoods. Poor neighborhoods that received significant public investment to rehabilitate and increase their affordable housing stock experienced smaller price declines in the 1990s downturn, and in some cases even saw prices increase during that period. City investment was more closely related to smaller housing price declines than any other neighborhood characteristic we studied," the report said.

"Particularly troubling is the disproportionate impact that both increases in foreclosures and declines in mortgage lending have had on communities of color throughout the city. Our research shows that in many cases the same neighborhoods that had the highest rates of high cost lending, and the highest rates of foreclosure, are now also seeing the greatest declines in new investment, leaving these neighborhoods particularly vulnerable to further decline," it continued.

"We found that residing in a higher-income neighborhood provided no shelter from price falls and no guarantee of future gains. Instead, prices in higher-income neighborhoods tended to grow less than the City average in the 1980s upturn and fall further in the 1990s downturn; and in the most recent upturn," the report found, "there was virtually no correlation between income and sales price performance."