My Hometown: Mahomet, Ill.

Photos courtesy of my brother, Joe Curnutte

My Hometown: Mahomet, Ill.
Median value in 1990: Approx. $83,000
My Home’s Zestimate today: $170,000

Before answering the call of Zillow and moving to Seattle about a month ago, I was fortunate to get a pretty diverse view of the U.S. I was born in Boston and lived in and around the city until I was 11, when my dad got a new job at the University of Illinois in Urbana, Ill. We moved to Mahomet, Ill. , a little town called of 6,000 about 10 miles from the university and stayed there until I went to college.

Even though I missed New England, there were perks of country life. The affordability of real estate in Mahomet got us a pool (huge bonus), a big backyard and a finished basement.

Mahomet is pretty much your classic Midwestern farm town, with the benefit of proximity to the cosmopolitan twin cities of Champaign-Urbana. My alma mater, the University of Illinois, straddles those two towns.

In Mahomet, high school football is king and you’re never far from a cornfield. But the town has changed a lot since I moved away more than a decade ago. New homes are always under construction, the citizens voted last year to lift the town-wide prohibition on alcohol, so new restaurants are opening downtown, and they got a few stoplights (seriously, when I was in high school there weren’t any). And after years of university-centrism that kept the downtowns of Champaign and Urbana pretty quiet, that is changing, too. Now when I go to visit my parents, there are wine bars, sushi restaurants and a completely revitalized campustown to keep me and my siblings entertained.

So it’s no surprise that homes in the Champaign area are still increasing in value, even as much of the rest of the country sees declines. Check out this graphic: No bubble whatsoever.

The area has seen steady appreciation for years, with an increase in value of more than 4 percent in the past five years.

As a recent college grad, I moved back to Boston, despite the fact that it has some of the most expensive real estate in the country. According to Zillow’s Second Quarter 2008 Real Estate Market Reports, the Zillow Home Value Index in the Boston area for Q2 was $357,022. In the Champaign, Ill. area, which includes Mahomet, it was $138,974.

By contrast, second quarter values in the Boston area fell almost 9 percent year-over-year, and saw 0 percent appreciation over the past five years (although homes have appreciated almost 7 percent in the past 10). Numbers aside, nothing can been the memories and hometown feeling of Mahomet, Illinois.