1350 Boylston, a 212-unit luxury apartment tower currently under construction in the Fenway.

Boston still has some of the highest, most crushing apartment rents in the nation. But there are signs that years of efforts by City Hall to boost construction of new housing may finally be paying off.

While the cost of living in one of the city’s newest towers continues to soar, rents in older buildings across Boston fell 4 percent in 2016, according to a new report due out soon from the Department of Neighborhood Development.

And even bigger drops were seen in studio and one-bedroom rents in older buildings – basically everything built before 2011.

In fact, it’s no coincidence that this is exactly the mix of units that make up the majority of the flood of new, luxury apartment towers and buildings that have opened up over the past few years, Sheila Dillon, the city’s housing chief, noted when I caught up with her last week.

“As more supply comes on, we will see the rents in the old stock continue to stagnate and decline,” Dillon said. “Every year we are seeing rent increases and for many people it was crippling.”

Scott Van Voorhis

Overall, average asking rents for all older apartments across the city fell below the $2,000 mark to $1,984, according to numbers compiled by city housing officials with help from RentalBeast and MLS.

One-bedrooms saw the biggest decline, falling 9 percent to $1,849, followed by an 8 percent drop in studio rents, to $1,481.

Larger apartments, by contrast, saw much less of a decline.

Two-bedroom rents in older buildings went down a more modest 2 percent, to $2,074, while three-bedrooms stayed the same at $2,282.

Neighborhood Effect

This also fits in with the theory that the surge of new luxury apartments is helping siphon off some of the already stiff competition for older units. There are simply a much more limited number of new, luxury two-bedroom units in the city’s newest apartment towers, with new three-bedrooms fairly rare.

The same pattern can be found at work when the numbers are sliced and diced by neighborhood as well, with older units in neighborhoods that have seen lots of new development seeing the biggest declines.

South Boston led the way, with asking rents in older apartments dropping 9 percent, to $2,262, with neighboring Dorchester, which is now just starting to see a take-off in new construction, falling 5 percent to $1,573. Older rentals in the South End and Allston-Brighton also both fell 5 percent, to $2,704 and $1,811, respectively.

Still, these numbers weren’t the only surprise the city survey turned out.

The pace of new luxury apartment construction around the country has slowed amid concern over a looming glut at the top end of the market. New York is a prime example and even some Boston developers have gotten the jitters, with Simon Properties citing softening luxury rents when it recently canned plans for a Copley Square tower.

But Boston’s luxury market may not be ready to collapse just yet, with asking rents at apartments built 2011 and later having jumped a pretty substantial 18 percent to $3,507.

Just take the Fenway, which has seen a mini-luxury building boom driven by new towers around Fenway Park. Asking rents for new apartments in the neighborhood are up 16 percent, to $3,371. Rents in new downtown Boston rental towers, of which there have been quite a few, were up by 25 percent, to a lofty $4,488.

Obviously, some of this is the result of increasingly expensive apartments hitting the market.

Even so, the numbers showing the big increase in luxury rents are pretty clearly a relief to city housing officials, which may seem odd at first, but isn’t if you really think about it.

Under the late Mayor Thomas M. Menino and now under Mayor Marty Walsh, Boston has adopted a build-our-way-out-of-this-mess strategy to bring down rents and home and condo prices.

A collapsing luxury market would be a significant blow to the city’s efforts, halting the surge in new construction that finally appears to be moderating rents in Boston’s older apartment buildings.

Of course, this is the hardly the only way that Dillon, the city’s housing czar, and her boss, the mayor, are looking to bring down rents, with a big push as well for thousands of new affordable rentals and others within reach of middle class families.

But it may be time to retire the simplistic notion that all those new, luxury apartment towers taking shape in Boston are making the city more unaffordable. In fact, it appears to be just the opposite.