It's important to understand this isn't a comparison of "can I find an apartment that's cheaper than buying a house". This is a comparison of like-for-like hous

It's important to understand this isn't a comparison of "can I find an apartment that's cheaper than buying a house". This is a comparison of like-for-like housing units. Check your local market, what can you rent an entire house for? What's the mortgage for buying a similar house look like? One thing renters often don't understand when making claims about the personal expenses buyers have to go through to maintain their property is that renters are paying for those things, it's simply amortized over the period the property is up for rent. The money has to come from somewhere, and it comes from the renters. When a renter moves, there is $0 from their rent that they are able to capture and move forward to their next property. While an owner can sell their previous property and carry forward their equity. To make an analogy, it would be like a renter being able to turn a $1000/mo rent into a $500/mo rent simply by having paid all the rent on-time at their previous place. This doesn't happen with renting, but it happens with buying, where a buyer can carry equity from a previous home into the purchase of a new one and turn a $500,000 loan into a $250,000 loan (assuming the equity they're carrying forward is worth 50% of the loan amount). The length of time you will live at a place is also unimportant. You always need to live somewhere. Suppose I need to start housing myself at 20 and die at 90. I need to sort out shelter for 70 years. By buying a place you pay for it for 30, then get it for "free" (minus taxes and maintenance) for 40 years. With renting, you pay for shelter for all 70 years. You can also rent out your property and make somebody else pay for it. Or rent out part of it for the same. In most rental markets, you can individually rent bedrooms for a total that exceeds the single unit rental price for the entire property. What about markets where the rental fee is lower than the mortgage + taxes + maintenance? The property owner probably bought the property when property prices where lower, or owns it outright or is expecting to capture the delta when selling the property. But rent here is so much lower than owning? For how long? If you purchase a home now, your 30 year mortgage will cost you the same per month for 30 years (or less if you pay off principal early). Thus a $2000/mo mortgage today will cost $2000/mo in 30 years. While rent only goes up -- usually with inflation. It's likely you'll be making more money in 30 years, so while renters will continue to pay the same share of income on rent, owners will not, their share of income for shelter decreases over time. The local property market has to be extremely strange for decades for buying to ever be a worse idea than renting over the long-run. There are some advantages to renting, but they're very rarely, if ever, financial over the long-term.