Take a look at Matt Yglesias's The Rent Is Too Damn High (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0078XGJXO); many "fun" municipalities like Seattle have restricted development to the point that housing is extremely expensive. If you move from Seattle to, say, Houston or Dallas, you'll probably see your effective rent shrink by 35 – 50%.
Secondly: see Tyler Cowen's books The Great Stagnation and Average is Over. Those books are too sophisticated and deep (though they're quite readable) to summarize here, but the shortish version is that Western economies are undergoing a lot of profound shifts driven by a combination of technology and Baumol's cost disease.
in the last couple years have been rent, medical, and dental in that order
Alex Tabarrok's Launching the Innovation Renaissance is also good: regarding medicine and dentistry, part of the issue is Baumol's Cost Disease and part of it is the powerful lobbies that restrict entry into those fields through licensing regimes and other means.
Finally, a general note: be wary of any answers in this thread that don't cite any sources and ideally those sources should be books. The issue is too complex for simple answers, and the simple answers that one tends to hear also tend to be wrong or missing a lot of important information.