Isn’t it fun to be a New Yorker? There’s the nasty weather much of the year, dirty subway stations, crowded restaurants and grid-locked streets. And exceedingly high home prices.

According to four residential real estate market reports released Friday, this year the typical Manhattan home buyer shelled out about five times as much as the average American paid for a place to live.

The Manhattan housing market is considerably off its peak. Back in late 2008, buyers paid an average of about $1,400 a square foot for a condo or co-op. The average price this year was a little over $1,000.

That may be a cool million dollars for a 1,000-square-foot apartment, but it still means home prices have fallen nearly 30 percent.

The average price for homes sold during the first three months of 2011 fell 2% to $800,000 year-over-year, according to the Corcoran Group. Brokers Halstead and Brown, Harris, Stevens both say the situation was worse, citing prices falling 4 percent to $787,500.

Miller, who makes the report for Prudential Douglas Elliman, said the median price fell 10 percent to $782,071. That drop was a bit deceiving, though. He said the mix of apartments sold changed considerably this quarter compared to the first quarter of 2010.

In those months, nearly half of all homes sold were cooperative apartments and half were condominiums. This time, though, the mix was 60-40 in favor of co-ops.

Condos, though, sell at a big premium to co-ops – an average of $1.15 million compared to $642,000 – and Miller thinks the growth in co-op sales accounts for most or all of the price difference he recorded.

The real estate market has followed, more or less, the course of the local economy. Hiring, for instance, has been less than robust in town and the unemployment rate has hovered in the region just below 9 percent for a number of months. It was 8.9 percent in February.

Miller does not expect much market volatility for the rest of the year.