“Plenty of pain yet to come,” is how one economist summed it up in an article in the New York Times this morning about the country’s housing market. The article’s main point is that the improving data we’ve seen over the past three months may very well be a head-fake rather than the first leg of a recovery:

Artificially low interest rates and a government tax credit are luring buyers, but both those inducements are scheduled to end. Defaults and distress sales are rising in the middle and upper price ranges. And millions of people have lost so much equity that they are locked into their homes for years, a modern variation of the Victorian debtor’s prison that is freezing a large swath of the market.

Closer to home, the data from Case-Shiller show that New York City is still holding up relatively well, with prices down just 10 percent over the last year, as compared to 30 percent in Las Vegas and 15 percent in Seattle.
Fears of a New Chill in Home Sales [NY Times]
Graph from the New York Times