by Whalehead King

Created on: December 20, 2008

Boston has a fairly strong real estate market right now. Values are down but not too much according to national averages I read in the papers. That said, like many things, maybe a downturn will come to New England and linger longer than anywhere else. Boston is an old city that doesn't necessarily play by the same rules other places do. Look at the landscape. You will see new developements but you will also see homes hundreds of years old that require regular maintenance that goes for dollars your pocketbook will never support. It isn't cheap to live in Boston but it doesn't have to be expensive either.

If you aren't set on putting down roots and becoming a Bostonian, renting is probably a better option than owning. Rents are reasonable if you are not in downtown proper. Mass transit in Boston is better than in most cities and I don't mean the bus. Real subways and surface trolleys reach many places at regular 8-12 minute intervals, so living close to a 'T' (Transit) station makes many locales more desireable than others. Boston is not New York; the subways stop running around 12:30 AM, but that is a lot better service than is found in most other American cities. The outlying neighborhoods served by train are East Boston, parts of Charlestown, Allston-Brighton, Dorchester, Mattapan, Roxbury and Jamaica Plain. Communities that aren't part of Boston but are connected to it by subways are Cambridge, Brookline, Somerville, Malden, Quincy and Braintree. This article concerns only Boston itself. Boston nieghborhoods that aren't located on the subway lines are served by commuter rail. You can get anywhere in Boston by regularly scheduled bus service and there are cabs.

Rent in Boston, like in most places runs the gamut of price ranges. A two-bedroom apartment will run in the $1000-$1500 range per month. The farther you move from downtown and the T stops the less the rent will be. Some neighborhoods have worse reputations than others but Boston's neighborhoods are big, sprawling affiairs so to say that Dorchester, the city's biggest neighborhood in population and area, is a high-crime area is misleading. Parts of Dorchester are quite picturesque and crime-free. We will use Dorchester as our illustration for navigating Boston's rental and ownership market. Similar situations exist elswhere all over the city and we will interject observations as we progress.

There is one week left in December 2008 and Dorchester has been the scene of 23 murders. Out of the roughly 100,000

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