The Office of Federal Enterprise Housing Oversight (say that 10x quickly) has a nice tool that allows you to pull home price growth data by month, by State. Basically, the HPI. Or as they put it so succinctly, “Annual Percent Change in OFHEO State-Level House Price Indexes through 2006 Q3″

See the chart below - clearly there’s two historical trends here since 1975, the year they began to index. The first trend shows steady growth in California, with several years of housing price declines in Oregon (1980-84).

The home price decline during this period may have been courtesy of a logging industry that dried up, with no industry to provide a an economic backbone hedge for Oregon. The second trend, one that probably matches the current growth trend more powerfully, suggests an inverse relationship between home prices in California, and those in Oregon. People cashing out of California?

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