Credit card borrowing in August dropped from a year earlier in cities that endured some of the biggest declines in home prices, showing consumers are still shedding debt six years after the residential housing market peaked, according to Equifax Inc.
Nationally, home prices have dropped 30 percent since peaking in the 2006’s second quarter, according to the Case-Shiller U.S. home-price indexes. Miami, Las Vegas and Phoenix, which had a 0.6 percent decrease in credit, all have had declines in housing prices of 50 percent or more.
Credit card debt fell 1.9 percent in the Las Vegas metropolitan area, 1.7 percent in Los Angeles, 0.9 percent in Miami and 0.8 percent in Atlanta and San Francisco, according to data Equifax first provided to Bloomberg News. Total card debt was unchanged in the month, the company said.
Americans have cut household debt by $1.3 trillion since the peak in the third quarter 2008 as the economy sank deeper into the 18-month recession that ended in June 2009, according to an Aug. 29 report by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
The lowest mortgage rates on record helped boost the S&P/Case-Shiller gauge of home prices in 20 U.S. cities, which rose 0.5 percent in June from a year earlier for the first gain since September 2010.
Coastal regions continue to recover slowly from the housing price slide.
California cities led real estate foreclosures nationally in the first half of 2012, with Miami, Phoenix, Las Vegas and Atlanta all among the top 20 in the pace of filings, according to RealtyTrac.
