Metro Area

Local incomes rose less quickly last year than they did in 2005, but the Baltimore metro area held on to its distinction as one of the richest regions in the country. Personal income in the metro area added up to $43,500 for every man, woman and child last year, according to preliminary numbers released yesterday by the Commerce Department. That ranked the region 21st out of the nation's 363 metropolitan regions. Metropolitan Baltimore's income rose about 5.4 percent per person last year, not accounting for the effects of inflation - about the same as the country overall.

CUMBERLAND -- Home prices in the Baltimore metro area? Up 5 percent. In the Washington area? Barely budging. In San Diego, Tampa, Las Vegas and several dozen other metros areas? Down, down, down. But in this corner of Appalachia - in this long-struggling, geographically isolated metro area - home prices have just shot up 17 percent. The National Association of Realtors, which calculated the change in median price for single-family homes sold in the first quarter of the year vs. the same period last year, says the Cumberland increase topped all other metro areas in the nation.

Erica Haywood, Towson Catholic's 6-foot-2 girls basketball center, is averaging a triple double for the second straight season. After six games, she is contributing 23.2 points, 18.7 rebounds and 12 blocks, as well as three assists a game to the Owls (5-1).Last week, the senior had 20 points, 10 rebounds and 15 blocks in a 52-37 loss to Parkville; 36 points, 27 rebounds, 14 blocks and six assists in a 93-31 win over Pompei; and 25 points, 25 rebounds and 17 blocks in a 62-23 win over Glenelg Country School.

Archbishop Curley, possibly the metro area's best hitting club, got a little stronger overall in beating visiting Loyola, 6-5, yesterday, with expected pitching ace Ray Price winning his first game of the season.The result created a three-way tie for first in the Maryland Interscholastic Athletic Association A Conference among No. 2-ranked Mount St. Joseph, No. 3 Calvert Hall and No. 6 Loyola at 9-3 each.No. 10 Curley is next at 9-4, and a healthy Price could be a plus as the Friars' wind down their 16-game league schedule and jockey for seeding in conference playoffs May 17-21 at Cannon Stadium.

St. John's Prospect Hall of Frederick, USA Today's No. 1-ranked boys high school basketball team, will be one of eight teams participating in the First National Bank Charm City Classic on Jan. 30-31 at Towson Center.Two metro area schools -- No. 4 Towson Catholic and No. 7 Spalding -- will be playing, both in the Southeast bracket. The Owls will play Strake Jesuit of Houston at 3: 45 p.m. on Jan. 30, while Spalding meets St. Raymond's of New York City.The Northwest bracket will have Prospect Hall facing Newport Prep of Montgomery County, ranked No. 3 in the Washington area and featuring 6-foot-9 guard/forward DeMarr Johnson, considered to be the best junior in the nation.

Last night's Severna Park-Annapolis field hockey match was postponed after Annapolis junior forward Caitlin Stone suffered a neck injury in the first half and was flown via helicopter to Shock Trauma."

On the soccer pitch, Archbishop Spalding senior goalkeeper Reb Beatty is an aggressive sort.His sophomore year was washed out when he broke a leg playing club ball, and he missed the first half of his junior season with a fractured wrist.It wasn't a coincidence that when Beatty got healthy last year, so did the Cavaliers -- winning seven of their last nine after a 3-6 start and reaching the Maryland Interscholastic Athletic Association A Conference semifinals, where they lost a tough 1-0 decision to Calvert Hall.

Jamie Vogtman scored 30 points, but that didn't prevent Mercy, ranked No. 1 in the Metro area, from being crunched, 70-57, by visiting Good Counsel of D.C. yesterday. The Magic trailed at the half, 32-27.Pub Date: 12/19/97

Jen Trotta, a senior outfielder from the Institute of Notre Dame, was mistakenly omitted from the chart listing The Sun's All-Metro Softball second team, which appeared Saturday.The Sun regrets the errors.Player of the yearCrystal Ray, Archbishop Spalding, senior, pitcher: In a highly-celebrated four-year career, Ray took high school softball pitching to a new level in the Baltimore metro area with a 65-mph fastball, a vicious biting drop curve, rise ball, knuckler, curve, an assortment of off-speed pitches and the courage to throw changeups on 3-2 counts.

Player of the yearAndy Vermillion, Arundel, senior, first base: Vermillion closed out his 3 1/2 years on the Wildcats varsity by becoming the sixth Wildcat since 1986 and the fourth during the '90s to be named county Player of the Year. Playing first base and center field, Vermillion drove in a state public school record 46 runs on his .442 (42-for-95) batting clip that included nine doubles, three triples, three homers and 30 runs scored. The 46 RBIs tied the overall (all schools included)

If you wanted to buy a home for less than $250,000 three years ago, three-quarters of the market in the Baltimore metro area was out of your price range. Then sellers got walloped. Housing slump. Mortgage meltdown. Recession. Now you under-$250,000 buyers - classic first-time home purchasers - have a lot more to choose from. Properties with asking prices in that range made up 43 percent of the metro area's housing market in May, up from 24 percent in May 2006. More under-$250,000 homes were for sale at the end of May - 8,149 - than in any previous May since 2001, according to a Baltimore Sun analysis of Metropolitan Regional Information Systems data.

Sellers handed buyers the keys to more homes last month than they did a year ago, the first sales increase in the Baltimore metro area in 2 1/2 years and a hopeful sign for a housing market caught in the worst downturn since the Depression. The uptick was modest - 2 percent - but every local jurisdiction saw a gain except Baltimore, and there the loss was just 1 percent. Multiple-listing service Metropolitan Regional Information Systems said Friday that 2,375 homes changed hands. And pending deals, which aren't counted as sales because they haven't closed, were up 16 percent from a year ago. This comes as average prices continued to fall, down 10 percent compared with June 2008.

The decline in home prices in the Baltimore metro area accelerated last month - the average fell below the 2005 figure - but the hemorrhaging in sales came to a near-halt. The average sale price in Baltimore and its five surrounding counties dropped to about $296,000, according to numbers released yesterday by Rockville-based Metropolitan Regional Information Systems. That's down nearly 6 percent from a year ago. And it's $7,500 less than sellers got in September 2005, at the height of the buying frenzy.

For anyone looking to buy or sell a home, last month was more of the same: Average sales prices in the Baltimore metro area continued to drop as the number of houses changing hands plummeted. The average price in the area - Baltimore City and the counties of Anne Arundel, Baltimore, Carroll, Harford and Howard - was just under $320,000. That's down 3 percent from a year earlier, according to numbers released yesterday by Metropolitan Regional Information Systems Inc. It's also below the average two years earlier.

The head of mortgage financing giant Fannie Mae said yesterday that he doesn't expect to see "some recovery and growth" in the housing market until 2010. "We think at Fannie Mae that '08 is going to be a tough year, kind of a continuation of the end of 2007; '09 will be similar," said Daniel Mudd, the company's president and chief executive, who spoke at a business journalism conference in Baltimore. Fannie Mae, which buys and repackages loans to sell to investors, claims about half the market for newly issued securities backed by single-family homes.

Maryland home sale prices fell at the end of the year, the first dip into negative territory since 1995, according to new government figures. The Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight said yesterday that prices in the state dropped modestly, just under 1 percent in the final three months of 2007 versus the fourth quarter of 2006. But conditions for sellers worsened as the year progressed, with prices falling 2.6 percent between the summer and fall alone. Home prices declined in every state except Maine in the October-December quarter versus the third quarter that ended Sept.

A widening swath of the country - including the Baltimore metro area - saw home prices decline during the final three months of last year. The 1 percent decline in the median price for a single-family home in the Baltimore area was the first in 11 years, according to a quarterly report released yesterday by the National Association of Realtors. Nationwide, median prices declined in just over half the 150 metropolitan areas surveyed by the trade group. Last spring, two-thirds of the country's metro areas were still reporting price gains.

Half the communities in the Baltimore metro area saw average home sale prices decline last year as the housing slump deepened. That's a big change from 2006, the first full year of the downturn, when prices were still rising in eight out of 10 local communities, a Sun analysis found. Price drops hit ZIP codes in every Baltimore-area jurisdiction last year, and about a quarter in the metro area recorded decreases of at least 5 percent. The most expensive counties - Howard, Anne Arundel and Carroll - had the biggest share of ZIP codes where average sale prices fell last year.

Buyers have the upper hand in today's housing market, but that's no guarantee that they can actually afford to buy. Despite the slump in home sales and growing concessions from sellers, prices remain out of reach for a wide section of workers in the Baltimore metro area, a new report suggests. The nonprofit Center for Housing Policy said yesterday that the price of a typical local home last summer was $269,000, too expensive for a nurse, an elementary school teacher, a police officer, a retail sales employee and workers in many other jobs.

The local housing market ended its second full year of the downturn in a worsening slump, with year-over-year sales in December falling 30 percent for the fourth month in a row. In all, sales in the Baltimore metro area dropped about 20 percent last year, according to a Sun calculation of preliminary numbers from Metropolitan Regional Information Systems Inc. That's a bigger decrease than the region saw in 2006. About 30,000 homes changed hands, the lowest in nine years - which is when MRIS began tracking area sales through the multiple-listing service.