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.

See photos of homes for sale in areas where prices are holding steady.

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.

HOME BUYING STRATEGIES • Housing blog: Discuss strategies for buying a home in the shaky market.

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

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