Top 10 cities where house prices are rising

4. Kankakee-Bradley, Ill: up 10.0 percent

Carlos Barria/AP/File
Home sales in the Kankakee-Bradley Illinois metro area are up 10 percent after dropping ten percent in 2007.

This midsize Illinois metro area saw housing prices drop 10 percent from its 2007 peak, according to the FHFA, but now it seems to be on the mend. The median home, worth $105,900 a year ago, is now $116, 500. It has had one of the strongest gains in jobs of any US metro during the past year.  Employment in the trade, transportation, and utilities sector grew 5.8 percent in 2011.

Kankakee has been a regular on the National Association of Home Builders/First America Improving Market Index, which  tracks housing markets on the mend, intending to draw attention to local metro where economic recovery is under way. The index measures improvement in employment, house prices, and single family housing permit growth. A softening in February dropped Kankakee from the list for the first time since October. 

7 of 10

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.