CHICAGO—Home prices throughout most American cities have continued to increase, but Chicago's recovery has finally started to outpace the rest of the country, according to the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices, released yesterday by S&P Dow Jones Indices. Earlier this year, the group reported that while average home prices in the 20 cities studied increased 9.3% from February 2012 to February 2013, Chicago's average only increased 5.1%, the smallest gain of any city except New York. But in this latest report, from April to May, Chicago prices increased 3.7%, and the 20-city average was 2.4%.

Other Midwestern cities included in the study were Detroit, Cleveland and Minneapolis. Both Detroit and Minneapolis have regularly posted double-digit year-to-year gains. But Detroit has suffered more from the housing collapse than other cities, and prices there have only reached a little more than $84,000, still the lowest by far of all the cities. Minneapolis' average rose 14.1% in the past year but Cleveland saw a mediocre 3.4% increase. And since Chicago has just begun a real improvement, its annual increase of 8.5% still lags the national 20-city average of 12.2%.

Still, from a national perspective, the numbers were quite positive. With the exception of New York, which was an outlier with a mere 3.3% increase, all 20 cities posted year-to-year gains ranging from 6.5% in Washington, DC, to 24.5% for San Francisco,.