San Francisco may be 3,000 miles from Wall Street, but the crisis that has engulfed the country’s biggest financial institutions is putting even more pressure on the Bay Area’s real estate market, making it increasingly difficult for home buyers to get credit.
Cheap credit played a dramatic role in fueling the housing boom of the late [...]

Tracy Dearman has plenty of long-term perspective on the current real estate downturn. She runs a small San Francisco brokerage that was started by her grandmother on Haight Street more than 50 years ago. “We have seen many cycles in the real estate market, but nothing quite like this,” said Dearman, 46. “Our sales and [...]

Foreclosures? Defaults? Falling home prices? Fire sales?
These are like foreign words to St. Helena homeowners, who have remained relatively unscathed by the badly troubled housing market going on all around them. While housing values have nose-dived to their lowest levels in more than two decades in the rest of Napa County and elsewhere in California, [...]