I was faced with this issue. But I didn’t like the idea of changing the group of my home directory to www-data. This problem can simply be solved by modifying the configuration file for the virtualHost.
Simply configure the Directory tag to include these
<Directory "your directory here">
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
Require all granted
</Directory>
The Require all granted is a new feature I guess; having a default value of denied.
see this page for further info: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/core.html#directory