Rising rents in the Boston area are forcing families to spend a higher portion of their income on housing costs, according to the Boston Foundation’s Housing Report Card, which was released yesterday.
Globe reporter Kimberly Blanton writes about the foundation report and rent prices in the city in today’s Business section.
At the same time, renter incomes [...]

Boston’s innovative effort to combat housing foreclosure’s effects on neighborhoods reached a milestone yesterday when the city selected a Roxbury developer to renovate four dilapidated homes on Hendry Street in Dorchester.
The Boston Redevelopment Authority selected Bilt-Rite Construction Inc. to purchase, fix up, and sell the city-controlled triple-deckers on the street, the epicenter of the city’s [...]

Home sales continued their slide in June, making the first half of 2008 the slowest housing market in more than 15 years, a Boston real estate publishing firm said today in its monthly housing report.
There were 4,663 sales of single-family homes last month, about a 15 percent decline from the number of sales transactions closed [...]

“Are you gonna pay for you food, fuel or mortgage?” asks Hampden County Register of Deeds Donald Ashe.
That’s the question plaguing homeowners across Hampden County. In the past 12 months 1,027 foreclosures were filed, the most in the county’s almost 200 year history. But Ashe says rising fuel and food costs aren’t entirely to blame. [...]