NYC Rents Are Highest In The Nation

My headline may seem obvious, but I actually expected San Francisco to have jumped into first place after reading an endless stream of recent stories about the housing situation there. But as Gothamist points out, NYC's average is skewed by all those new "ultra-luxury" jillionaire sky palaces. San Francisco doesn't have quite so many places that rent in the five-figure range. Via Reuters:

Asking rent during the second quarter rose by 0.6 percent to a [national] average of $1,109.73  a month. A year earlier, rents jumped 1.1 percent. New York City remained the most expensive market. Average rents for the city's four largest boroughs - Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx - rose 1 percent to $3,017.19 a month, the first time the average rent topped $3,000 since Reis began collecting data in 1980. (The firm did not include New York's smallest borough, Staten Island.)  The average New York rent was more than 50 percent higher than second-place San Francisco, where rent grew 1.1 percent from the first quarter to $1,998.82. Oklahoma City was the cheapest market, at an average of $571.03 a month, up 0.6 percent. During the second quarter, developers added 26,584 new units to the U.S. apartment market, about the same as the first half of last year and 22.8 percent more than the first half of 2011.