The recession has hit middle-income and poor families hardest, widening the economic gap between the richest and poorest Americans as rippling job layoffs ravaged household budgets. The wealthiest 10 percent of Americans — those making more than $138,000 each year — earned 11.4 ...

A non-profit housing advocacy group said Monday it will protest at the homes of those it calls "financial predators" — investors and banking executives it says are balking at helping struggling homeowners refinance their mortgages. Neighborhood Assistance Corp. of America demonstrated Sunday at the Greenwich, Conn., home of ...

The battle over the mass modifications of troubled mortgages has begun in earnest. On Dec. 1, William Frey, a private investor in mortgage-backed securities, filed a lawsuit in New York State Supreme Court alleging that the proposed modification of some 400,000 home loans originally underwritten by the defunct lender Countrywide Financial is illegal.

New Orleans was the fastest-growing large city in the nation last year, but its population is still about half what it was before Hurricane Katrina, the U.S. Census Bureau reported Thursday. Between July 1, 2006, and July 1, 2007, its population jumped 13.8 percent to ...