High housing costs have put homeownership increasingly out of reach in a number of local suburbs.

The measure follows an investigation from DCist that uncovered hundreds of instances in which process servers filed affidavits with discrepancies.

The new lawsuit also alleges that real estate company Daro charged fees to voucher recipients but not other renters.

It is 31 percent cheaper to buy a house in D.C. than it is to rent one.

If you want to live in the District’s suburbs, your savings on housing costs are certain to be eaten up by significantly higher transportation costs — so says a new report published today by the Center for Neighborhood Technology and the D.C. Office of Planning.

U.S. News and World Report has it that a spike in rents in the District “could exceed 10 percent,” since the recession hasn’t affected Washington in the way it has other cities, leading to more demand from renters.

When I first moved into the District of Columbia, I rented a room in a very old, large group house in upper Northwest that housed as many as eight different people at any given time. The rent was fantastic. But one of the many, many drawbacks was that, during the winter, we couldn’t really heat the place. (Of course, whether that was worse than having to battle two other guys for bathroom space in the morning is arguable.) See, the house wasn’t really in the greatest shape, and so turning the thermostat anywhere above the low 60s was a recipe for a gas bill a mile long. Yeah, it sucked — especially when one of my former roommates almost burned down the place by leaving his space heater on all night. With that said, it warms my heart to see that the District’s Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs trying to get the word out to the public about heating regulations for apartments in D.C.

Photo by maxedaperture According to a new Center for Housing Policy study, D.C. was the sixth most expensive rental market in the country last year, ranking just behind New York’s Suffolk County. The average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in 2009 was a reported $1,494. You can download the full report and rankings [PDF] here. NB: they have Bethesda and D.C. broken out as individual cities, tied for sixth, with the same “fair market…

Photo by Pappa91.Do you rent one of the hundreds of basement apartments in the District of Columbia? If so, there was certainly nothing reassuring about some of the comments left on this Prince of Petworth post about reporting rental income, which turned into a happy hour of sorts for less-than-ethical property owners. For example, here’s one commenter’s advice to the property owner in search of ways to reduce the amount of rental income they need…

Could D.C. possibly handle a Snowpocolypse during the Inauguration ceremony? Mark Segraves explores the possibility and notes that D.C. Public Works has about 80 employees earn Secret Service clearance in case roads need to be cleared. It’s probably not as wicked as soldiers with flamethrowers clearing the way for Kennedy’s parade in 1961, but hey, whatever. (Rest assured, we’ve got Davy DCist at the ready — even if he’s still being cranky.) In any case,…