The Las Vegas housing market has finally emerged from a long dark period. Home sales are up, home values are way up, and the tens of thousands of jobs lost during the economic collapse have been recouped, according to state officials.

But there are warning signs that we might be headed for another housing bubble, and some financial experts warn that we should not forget the lessons learned since the bubble burst almost 10 years ago.

Five years ago, the I-team unleashed a massive project called “Desert Underwater,” which explained the reasons why the Nevada economy — once thought to be recession proof — collapsed.

WATCH: Desert Underwater special produced by the I-Team

This story is the beginning of a multi-part I-Team project.

Now that the housing market appears to be bouncing back, there are signs that some of the same calamitous decisions that led to disaster the last time are popping up once again.

Remember scenes of constables ordering people to get out of their homes? For a period, there were 300 foreclosure evictions per day in Clark County — 130,000 in a four-year period. Las Vegas led the nation in ways no one could have imagined.

“We are first in the nation in defaults, first in foreclosures, first in bankruptcies, first in unemployment,” said Barbara Buckley, former Nevada assemblywoman.

The human cost was staggering.

Beatrice Cortinas and her husband moved from their home of many years into a tent in their backyard. They fought the bank, but now, five years later, they’ve finally conceded defeat.

“I work all my life for this house, and then now it’s gone,” said Armando Cortinas.

“It’s been very hard,” said Beatrice Cortinas. “It’s been very hard.”

The numbers are staggering.

Seventy thousand construction jobs vanished, seemingly overnight. Another 186,000 jobs were lost across the board.

The unemployment rate was close to 15 percent and 65 percent of all Nevada homeowners owed more than their homes were worth.

The foreclosure rate in Nevada was five times the national average. Banks failed. Huge projects were cancelled. Personal bankruptcies soared. Some just walked away from their homes. Others trashed them to punish the banks. Entire neighborhoods became foreclosure ghettos, squatters and criminals moved into vacant homes and many are still living there.

“It was tough on everyone. Nobody escaped it. Nobody escaped it,” said attorney Tisha Black.

She represented many developers and homebuilders. She knows of 26 suicides.

“They’d worked their whole lives and not only lost their house, but people who lost their businesses. People were decimated,” Black said.

“It was $11 trillion in household wealth that was wiped out during the course of the financial crisis,” Heather Murren said.

As a former Wall Street analyst, Murren served on the presidential commission which investigated the crisis. She thinks that reforms since then make it tougher for something of that magnitude to happen again, but says smaller regional bubbles could grow, then burst, and Las Vegas is showing some signs.

“We’re starting to see it now. Certainly housing prices have risen. The demand for housing has escalated to levels that haven’t been seen since 2005 or thereabouts.”

Land prices are rising. Home values shot up more than seven percent last year. Construction jobs are growing steadily, even though, Tisha Black notes, we still have not seen the full brunt of the previous collapse.

“In the last six months, I’m getting some new cases on short sales and loan modifications. We’re still top five consistently in foreclosures. A full quarter of our inventory have still not dealt with being underwater,” Black said.

She believes more is coming.

There was plenty of blame to go around. Federal regulators who failed to do their jobs, investors and homeowners looking to get rich quick, but the fingerprints of Wall Street banks were all over the crisis. Bankers paid tens of billions in fines, but despite engineering the largest theft in human history, none of them went to prison.