In new buildings? (No. Right now, I’m seeing $1600 for new 1BRs in North Raleigh.) You wouldn’t price-compare new and used cars, so why price-compare new and old houses?
Only 1% of Americans live in new buildings. We shouldn’t expect that shiny, brand-new things, built to more stringent standards, will be inexpensive - much less new downtown high-rises, aka the most expensive and difficult buildings to construct, sitting on the most valuable land.
75% of the country’s affordable housing is “naturally occurring affordable housing”: older, privately owned buildings that have depreciated to the point where they charge lower rents. One of Raleigh’s problems is that as a relatively recently built-up city, there just isn’t a lot of older housing of any sort - much less a lot of 30+ year old apartments. (Small cities don’t have lots of multifamily, and especially not exclusionarily zoned cities like Raleigh which encouraged large-lot houses instead.) What few older houses we do have sit on large parcels of now-valuable land, so (a) they’re not cheap, and (b) they’re ripe for redevelopment into… expensive new houses.
(Which is why I’m excited that Raleigh recently legalized flag lots!)