The 5 percent rise of the S&P/Case Shiller 20-city home price index in the 12 months through March shows that the housing sector is on the rise, right?

Not for everyone, says Elyse Cherry, CEO of Boston Community Capital, which works to help the underprivileged. "For many lower-income Americans, the housing bust of 2008 was just a prelude to a new crisis," she writes in The New York Times.

"In many areas, housing prices are stuck below their inflated pre-bubble levels. Until we deal with this fact, entire communities will continue to struggle with high foreclosure rates and a lack of economic mobility."

Ironically, an improvement after the 2008 crisis has helped create the problem, Cherry argues. With the "return to sane mortgage underwriting practices, loan officers are no longer handing out mortgages left and right, but instead are tying them to borrowers' income."

Therefore, "housing prices can rise only if incomes rise, or if people can spend a greater share of their income on housing."

But income for the poor is stagnant, she notes. Average hourly wages rose only 2.2 percent in the 12 months through April.

"Absent an extraordinary increase in income for low-income families, home prices in low-income areas aren't going anywhere," Cherry states.

Meanwhile, Keith Jurow, author of the Capital Preservation Real Estate Report newsletter, is bearish on the housing market as a whole.

Don't be fooled by the recent spate of good housing news, he says. In addition to the increase of the Case-Shiller index, new home sales climbed 6.8 percent in the 12 months through April.

But beneath the surface, things aren't so pretty Jurow writes on Advisor Perspectives. The Case-Shiller index growth rate has shrunk markedly from the 13 percent increase for 2013, he notes.

And despite historically low mortgage rates, "new home sales are still at one­third the level of the bubble years [2006-07, and] existing home sales have never come close to peak-year levels," Jurow points out. At the same time, data showing a decline in delinquent mortgages is misleading, he says.

Bottom line: "the housing collapse is ready to resume in earnest."

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