Today, Washington, D.C., ranks among the nation’s most thriving and vibrant cities. While the rest of the country got hammered by the Great Recession of 2008 and struggled to recover eight years later, a remarkable inversion occurred in Washington, D.C.

At $26 trillion, the American housing market is the largest asset class in the world, bigger than the U.S. stock market, according to The Economist. And the banking industry’s $13 trillion in total loans is the engine that drives the U.S. housing market, according to Attom Data Solutions.

Some believe house flipping is a fad. It’s anything but that. Not only is flipping homes for a profit a growing industry, but it is exceedingly popular on cable television, where more than half dozen prime-time flipping shows feature quick-turn real estate investors. Americans — it seems — can’t get enough of flipping shows. And the growing number of flippers bears this out.

Boston is undergoing one of the biggest development booms in decades, with a new generation of luxury residential towers being built in Greater Boston. It’s a multi-billion dollar transformation that stretches from the heart of downtown outward towards the suburbs.

Eleven years after Hurricane Katrina, the New Orleans real estate market has become what Rick Haase, president of Latter & Blum, calls “a tale of two cities.”

Just 10 years ago, easy credit and lax banking lending standards in the U.S. residential real estate market were partly to blame for a housing bubble that popped and caused over 7 million borrowers to lose their homes to foreclosure during the 2008 housing downturn, which triggered the Great Recession and unleashed a global financial meltdown.

On Aug. 23, 2005, the hurricanes at Pat O’Brien’s — the famed French Quarter watering hole — were flying off the bar. Few in the Sportsman’s Paradise had noticed the formation of small tropical depression germinating in the warm Atlantic Ocean waters that summer. Everyone in the Big Easy was enjoying life and letting the bon ton roulette (the good times roll).

Low inventory. Rising prices. Bidding wars. Frustrated buyers. These are the hallmarks of the current housing market in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. In the Twin Cities sales are climbing, prices are rising, but inventory is short, experts claim.