A lot of the reason housing had appreciated so much in certain jurisdictions in recent years is because many jurisdictions make it difficult to build enough housing units to satisfy demand in the most productive regions of the country, so people have used their high incomes to bid up the existing housing stock.
When New York City got rich and grew over the course of the 19th and early 20th centuries, high real estate values were handled by building housing and commercial space at high densities. On the other hand, even as much of California has gotten rich since the 1950s or so, the housing remains mostly single-family on large lots, and even multi-family is density-limited, either explicitly or by parking requirements. It's also become difficult for various regulatory reasons to build more housing in NYC. On account of housing demand vastly outstripping supply, both NYC and California have become extremely expensive in the past few decades, and keep their population in balance with their housing stock by pricing people out rather than by building more housing. That's why the same ranch house costs $90k in Indiana and $1M in Silicon Valley.
There are all manner of regulations in many places like minimum parking requirements, minimum lot size requirements, minimum setbacks, minimum square footages, and maximum floor area ratios that likewise distort the market and artificially drive up housing prices.
As many younger people are coming to prefer urban living again and suburban living becomes more expensive with higher oil prices, I'm hoping these artificial constraints on homebuilding and density are lifted, which would move us toward a housing market driven more by construction costs and less by artificial restrictions. That may be too much to hope for, though.
What all this is getting at is that there are a whole lot of factors driving housing supply and demand, which in turn drive housing prices. Most of the regulations (and geographic factors) determining supply, and the local job market and cultural amenities driving demand, aren't correlated nationwide. Research your own market, and diversify your assets unless you really want to bet everything on your hometown.