It really depends on the circumstances. For me personally renting and investing is indeed better - but my rent is 500 Eur per month for 100m² cold and I can't finance a similar sized house for that here. Everyone needs to do their own math for their situation.

During the last housing bubble, you could rent the same place for less than 1/2 the cost of buying it. Renting and investing made more sense then.

Currently buying a house is overpriced but rent is even more so.

The best financial decision right now is to live with your parents your entire life. If you don't have a parent you can stay with, then a tent and cardboard boxes in the park it is.

I just did the math for renting/investing vs buying, including rent/house value yearly increase, income taxes on capital gains, mortgage rate, down payment amount, and initial house price. The results indicate a strong dependence on rent price and taxes/insurance for buying. I found that renting/investing can be a better financial option depending on the inputs. As another commenter pointed out, the main reasons are taxes/insurance and the greater time return rate for market vs home value. This was surprising to me, so I'm glad I ran the numbers. That tells me the real difference is your life choice of wanting a place of your own vs renting and moving around.

Taxes and maintenance wouldn't be included in the mortgage. A new roof is expensive, so are HVACs, floors, etc. These things will need to be replaced. A rule of thumb is to budget 1% to 4% of the total house value per year. For a 400k house that could be up to $16k extra per year, or $1333 more per month than your mortgage. Those costs for maintenance and taxes don't go towards paying down your principal so they aren't directly gaining equity. With the rent and invest option, the investing is the counter to equity. When you sell your house you usually pay a realtor commission. There are a lot of factors to include when seeing if rent & invest is better than mortgage & buy.

That being said, I prefer to buy. I don't plan on moving anytime soon.

Aka Gaza style

And saving the owners hundreds a month in vacant house insurance costs.

California’s housing would be much less of an issue if the high speed rail was built

This literally happens in some areas outside the US. I can't remember if it's NotJustBikes or HappyTowns that talks about it on YouTube. But basically, the government offers affordable housing to force landlords to compete on quality and price. Shockingly in those areas rents are down and the quality of apartments is decent.

Housing is a human right, not an investment. Nationalize housing

Rented a flat from a family for 3 years. The flat had not been renewed in over 60 years, but I was alright with that. The flat had several problems, they never wanted to fix.

One day the electrical system starts going out over and over again, fuses would burn every few days. I had to tell them that in case of fire they'd be responsible for everything I had in the house before they agreed they should fix the electric system.

Since they were going to fix the electric system, they decided to do a bit more work and change the floor and a few things more. They wanted to increase the rent 50% to account for these improvements; even though that is illegal I accepted, since they were in fact improving the flat.

I had to move out for two months while the works were going on. One week before the end of the works, the flat was really not done yet. I asked several times whether it would be ready, because I'd need to find and accomodation in the meanwhile. I asked for a discount of half a month so that I could cover expenses and because nobody knew when they would actually complete the works.

The day before I was supposed to get back into the flat, they decided that I was posing way too many conditions and kicked me out. They decided to keep the safety deposit because a plastic floor old over 60 years had started cracking. 8 months later, they still have some boxes of stuff which is mine but never have time to meet me to give it back to me.

Time has passed and I still have to go to a lawyer, because I the meanwhile I had a bunch of trouble to solve. I'm sure I can win a trial against them, but even if I do win the trial I'll have gone through a bunch of trouble just to get my safety deposit back. I'll be doing it just because they need to fuck off, but still...

Now, most people renting places were I live are exactly like this. It is not big corporations, it people who got one or maybe a few flats on rent.

Pretending that small landlords and corporate landlords are the same is like saying your local grocer is as bad as Walmart

Your comparison is valid, but it works against your interests. Your local grocer, as a business owner, is every bit against rising minimum wage as Walmart is: both of them see reduced profits when minimum wages are increased, so the class relations between them and their workers make them support anti-worker-rights policy.

In the same manner, your local landlord has every reason to be as opposed to measures such as rent caps or rent freezes as BlackRock.

Yes, rent should exist as an alternative to home ownership, but the housing for rent should be publicly owned and rented at maintenance-cost prices as has been done successfully in many socialist countries before which managed to abolish homelessness. As an example, by the 1970s rent in the Soviet Union costed about 3% of the monthly average income. Can't we do better than that 55 years of technological progress later?

Renting is important to have available but it absolutely does not need to be at the level its at. The amount of people paying for someone else’s investment while wishing they could own something of their own is crazy and it’s insane that we’ve normalized that. And all the while they’re just hoping nothing goes wrong because it seems like even the “good” landlords are hit-or-miss when it comes to getting them to do literally anything. Mine’s usually pretty good but right now there’s a fucking hole in the foundation and getting them to properly address it is a hurdle I shouldn’t have to go through. In order for these buildings to be profitable the tenants need to not only pay for those issues you mentioned but now they’re also paying for someone else’s salary AND in the end that person gets to sell the building and keep all that money, too.

The reason the housing market is fucked in the US and Canada is becauss there are very few rent controls and a lot of the power sides with the landlords. In Montréal you have to be worried about going taking them to court because future landlords can just look up if you’ve ever done anything and deny you a place to live even if the problem was your current landlord is dogshit. Oh, and there’s a new law that’s around landlords being able to use necessary renovations as excuses to raise your rent! They have all the power and it doesn’t matter if they’re big or small, it’s a “business” that attracts the kind of people who don’t mind making easy money off of making you pay for their stuff.

Your landlord(probably) isn’t going to let you hit it because you’re glazing them on Lemmy. Stand up for yourself and others, even if you got lucky with a landlord who is considered good because they don’t throw a hissy fit when you ask them to do their fucking job.