Cloud hangs over US housing rebound
The market is better but the revival is deeply uneven, worsening divides and creating fissures
Stockton
EAST of San Francisco, beyond the Bay Area's rabid housing market and high-tech office parks, is a different California where the air is hotter, the land is cheaper and the homeowners are enduring a more precarious version of the American dream.
You get there on Interstate 580, through 80 kilometres of suburbs and farmland, up into the bald hills of the Diablo Range that are suitable for neither. The highway, eight lanes wide, cuts through at the Altamont Pass, 308 metres above sea level. And then the hills part and California's Central Valley comes into view: an unexpectedly flat landscape that feels very far from San Francisco, and where Stockton and its neighbours are still suffering the lingering effects of the worst housing bust in the nation.
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