Jonathan Miller, president of the Miller Samuel appraisal firm, said the last time he had paid a similar amount was in a western suburb of Chicago in 1984, and at the time, he said, he thought his one-bedroom apartment was fabulous. Twenty years later, however, he drove by to take a peek at it with fresh eyes.

“I looked,” Mr. Miller said. “And I thought: ‘Oh. What a dump.’ ”

Ms. Cosmadopoulos, who says her childhood in San Francisco prepared her for New York’s real estate madness, might already use the same word to describe her first place in Brooklyn: a three-bedroom basement apartment by the B.Q.E., a 12-minute walk from the Carroll Street stop on the F train.

“We would literally find like three water bugs a day,” she said. “That was not ideal.”

Her portion of the rent was $550 a month, but she and her two roommates decided that even that was too much, she said. They broke the lease, and she moved into a two-bedroom, sixth-floor walk-up in Williamsburg, near the Lorimer Street stop on the L train, where she paid $675.

“That was when I was being a little social butterfly and wanted to be near everything,” she said. “I was paying for the neighborhood, not the apartment. But it was still only $675, which for Williamsburg, now, you can’t really find.”

By mid-2009, when the lease expired, rising prices and occasional vermin had prompted Ms. Cosmadopoulos to decamp farther east on the L line, to the Morgan Avenue stop in Bushwick. There, she lived with perhaps the worst of all possible floor plans, she said, in a four-bedroom railroad apartment. This did not last long. When the downstairs neighbors got bedbugs, Ms. Cosmadopoulos left, after only two months.

Next, she chose a less-hip subway line, near the Myrtle Avenue stop on the J train. That apartment, which was on Suydam Street, had been meticulously restored — it was rumored to have spent many years as a crack den, she explained — but the layout was a bit awkward. Her rent was only $575, and after two years of unannounced visits from the landlord, who was endlessly concerned about the state of the floors and ceiling lamps, she decided to move on.

In October, Ms. Cosmadopoulos moved to her current apartment on a tree-lined block in Bedford-Stuyvesant, near the Kingston-Throop stop on the C line, providing an easy commute to her job as an art studio coordinator at Pure Vision Arts in Manhattan. She works with adults who have developmental disabilities.