Boston home-buying affordability: New report offers bad news for prospective owners

How affordable is buying a home in Boston versus the rest of the United States? Not so much, says a new report from RealtyHop.

The listings and research site culled data on property prices and taxes as well as median household income, and then compared the 100 most populous U.S. cities. Boston came out the eighth least affordable city for buying a home.

Buyers have to spend 56.34 percent of their monthly income on homeownership, the RealtyHop study said. That is one of the highest shares in the entire eastern United States. California cities accounted for half of the 10 least affordable cities. Check out the chart below.

That Boston would rank high on such a list is probably no surprise. Little wonder, then, that so much is underway or under consideration to either bring down or freeze housing costs, or to make buying and renting that much more accessible.