Updated 11/6/2008.

An exiting army of Republican foot soldiers is faced with the prospect of selling its Washington-area homes in the worst housing bust since the Great Depression.

Many Republican-appointed officials in Washington are nested in northern Virginia, which has traditionally attracted more Republicans than suburban Maryland. And for those who arrived near the height of the housing bubble, particularly those who came after George W. Bush was re-elected in 2004, what a time to buy in northern Virginia it was.

Like Miami and Las Vegas, northern Virginia was frantically built up during the housing bubble. Prices of single-family homes and condos skyrocketed. When I first lived in the area a couple of years ago, I remember hearing the curious term “Fairfaxed.” It referred to Fairfax County, Va., an overbuilt Washington suburb. Despite Fairfax’s perpetual gridlock, builders continued to plant residential high-rises around the county and beyond in anticipation that housing prices would climb ever higher. Residents in nearby Loudoun County lamented that their greatest fears were being realized: They were, after at least a decade of warnings, finally being “Fairfaxed.”

Fast-forward to today. Also like Miami and Las Vegas, northern Virginia’s housing market has cratered. The average housing price in the greater northern Virginia area in September declined 32.11 percent from the previous year, according to the Northern Virginia Association of Realtors.

And this is the market that many Republican officials, turning over the executive branch to an Obama administration, will have to sell in.

I thank my colleague Gardiner Harris for the pointer.

Update 11/6/08:

I’ve revised this post to address some of the reader concerns expressed in the comments. I did not mean to indicate that I was partaking in schadenfreude; this post was instead meant to be an observation that, because of Washington’s scheduling quirks in residential turnover, a certain subgroup of this area likely bought high and now has to sell low.

Over all, as I mentioned in a previous post, the entire metropolitan area, including Northern Virginia, does vote Democratic; but within that metropolitan area, the greater Northern Virginia area attracts a larger share of the region’s Republicans. Barack Obama beat John McCain by an 17.8 percentage-point margin in Virginia’s Fairfax County, for example, and by a 43.7-point margin in Maryland’s Montgomery County (and an 86.4-point margin in Washington, D.C. proper). As David Brooks wrote in The Atlantic a few years ago:

In the Washington, D.C., area Democratic lawyers tend to live in suburban Maryland, and Republican lawyers tend to live in suburban Virginia. If you asked a Democratic lawyer to move from her $750,000 house in Bethesda, Maryland, to a $750,000 house in Great Falls, Virginia, she’d look at you as if you had just asked her to buy a pickup truck with a gun rack and to shove chewing tobacco in her kid’s mouth.

And as I mentioned above, Northern Virginia experienced an especially intense building craze in recent years, and is busting now. This means that the unlucky people trying to move out of the area – which will probably include a number of people who were here specifically because of relationships with the Republican administration – are stuck with a bad time to sell, especially relative to the time they bought.