Perhaps no real estate market in the U.S. will have as much trouble recovering from the current housing crisis as Southeast Michigan. Unlike a lot of areas, Detroit's housing market didn't become overheated by subprime mortgages. Rather, it is a region that has been on the decline for decades.

Detroit has yet to really recover from the race riots of the 1960s. Demographics reflect that. Detroit's population peaked in 1950 with about 1.8 million residents. By 1980 there were about 1.2 million people. Today there are only about 870,000.

Economics are another problem. Southeast Michigan has lost about 300,000 manufacturing jobs over the past few years. The auto industry accounts for about half of those losses. Those jobs won't be coming back, so the region is struggling along with other rust-belt communities to find new ones.

Experts say areas like Las Vegas, Miami, and Southern California should bounce back fairly quickly from the current housing shock because people want to live and retire there. That isn't the case for Southeast Michigan.

Robert Van Order is a real estate and finance professor at the University of Michigan. He says strong demographics, job growth, and rising home values make a dynamic housing market. Van Order predicts that is something the Detroit area won't see for awhile.

As we drove around Detroit for my “A Tale of 5 Cities” story, it wasn't difficult to find neighborhoods with three or four homes on a single street boarded up because of foreclosure. Many of these homes seemed beyond repair, but others offered promise.

Southeast Michigan's future, and that of its housing market, hinges on young people moving to the area and investing in it. If the region fails to find a way to do that, its housing market may never fully recover.