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 have declined, placing even more pressure on low-income renters, the foundation said.

Families put on average about 38 percent of their monthly income toward rent in 2007 and 2008, because of rent increases and declining income levels, according to the foundation report. Just seven years earlier, families were paying an average of 28 percent of their income for rent. Rent is considered affordable when it takes up 30 percent or less of a family’s monthly income.

The housing market downturn is largely to blame for rising rents, because more families are losing their homes to foreclosure and must then look for rental units, according to the report. As demand for rentals increases, so do the rents. Though not all areas of the state are seeing the same rent increase.

In the Boston area, rents were up 4.2 percent over the past year, according to an analysis by New York research firm Reis Inc., which Blanton also wrote about. The average monthly rent in Boston-area apartment buildings with at least 40 units was $1,659 in the third quarter, compared with $1,592 in the same period of 2007. The Boston area rent increase was slightly higher than the average national increase of 3.5 percent, according to Reis.

Has your rent been eating up more of your take-home pay? How concerned are you about this trend? Do you think you might have to move to another town, another state?

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