Priced
Out of
Boston

Rents vary wildly across Boston neighborhoods

The map shows median gross rent for every neighborhood in Suffolk County, drawn from the 2023 American Community Survey. The color tells the story at a glance: the red neighborhoods are the most expensive, and they cluster in a very specific part of the city.

MBTA stations are plotted as colored dots. Notice where the densest transit access overlaps with the deepest red.

Source: US Census Bureau, ACS 5 Year Estimates 2023, Table B25064 · MBTA GTFS Open Data 2026

The most expensive neighborhoods sit along transit corridors

Fenway, South Boston, and Charlestown, all well served by the Red, Green, and Orange lines having median rents above $2,900 per month. These are neighborhoods where high income renters can afford to outbid longtime residents for access to jobs, services, and the T.

Source: ACS 5-Year 2023, B25064 · MBTA GTFS 2026

Roxbury and Mattapan sit at the other end entirely

Roxbury's median rent of $1,186 is less than a third of Fenway's. Mattapan is $1,154. Both neighborhoods are majority Black, and both are served primarily by the Fairmount Line, the least frequent rapid transit corridor in Boston.

Lower absolute rents can mask a harder truth: when income is also low, even a "cheaper" rent can consume a devastating share of what a family brings home.

Source: ACS 5-Year 2023, B25064 · MIT / City Life-Vida Urbana Eviction Report 2020

High rent alone does not mean a housing crisis

Economists define "cost-burdened" as spending more than 30% of gross income on rent. A household earning $170,000 a year paying $3,100 a month is spending about 22% of income on housing. That is uncomfortable, but manageable.

The dashed line on this chart shows that 30% threshold. What matters is not just where rents are high, but where rents are high relative to what people actually earn.

Source: ACS 2023 B25064 (rent) · B19013 (income) · B03002 (race)

Roxbury and Dorchester carry the heaviest load

Roxbury's median income is $41,474. At a median rent of $1,186 a month, renters there are spending 34% of their income on housing. That puts them above the cost-burden threshold despite paying some of the lowest rents in the city.

Back Bay tells a different story: rent is $2,267, but the census tracts there have wide income variation, and some households are genuinely squeezed.

Source: ACS 2023 B25064 · B19013

The pattern follows race

The color of each dot shows the majority demographic of that neighborhood. Black and Latino majority neighborhoods cluster in the lower-income, higher-burden part of the chart. White majority neighborhoods cluster toward higher income and lower burden.

This is not a coincidence. It reflects decades of redlining, urban renewal displacement, and discriminatory lending that limited where Black and Latino families could build wealth in Boston.

Source: ACS 2023 B03002 · Boston Fair Housing Commission Historical Reports

When rent becomes unaffordable, eviction follows

Between 2014 and 2016, more than 16,000 market rate eviction cases were filed in Boston Housing Court. MIT researchers and City Life/Vida Urbana mapped every one of them. The geographic concentration is stark.

Source: Robinson and Steil, MIT / City Life–Vida Urbana, Evictions in Boston, 2020

Roxbury and Mattapan face rates 6 to 7 times higher than wealthier neighborhoods

The eviction filing rate in Mattapan and Roxbury is seven times greater than in Allston and Brighton, and six times greater than in South Boston. These are not marginal differences. They represent an entirely different housing reality unfolding in the same city.

The MBTA stations shown here reveal something important: the Orange Line runs directly through Roxbury. Transit proximity alone does not protect renters when incomes are low and rents keep climbing.

Source: Robinson and Steil, MIT, 2020

The Fairmount corridor connects the most vulnerable communities

The Fairmount Line (shown in purple) threads through Hyde Park, Mattapan, Dorchester, and Roxbury; the neighborhoods with both the highest eviction rates and the least frequent transit service. Trains run roughly every 30 minutes during peak hours, compared to every 5 minutes on the Red Line.

When residents are evicted from neighborhoods closer to the core, many move to communities along this corridor. They trade proximity to jobs for lower rents, and in doing so, move further from the transit that connects them to those jobs.

Source: TransitCenter Equity Dashboard 2023 · MIT Eviction Report 2020