Interest is a good point. But taxes are in the noise where I live, as is all the rest of your list.

Either way, we could debate a whole bunch of minor costs, and it's obviously not the same for everyone. But that would be missing the point completely.

If you sell your 500k house for a very very bad return of 125k, you will be 125k ahead of where a renter is. Renting returns nothing. Whether or not I get back 100% of what I put in, the point is when you rent you get nothing back.

I think this is an unfair comparison, because by choosing to buy a house rather than rent, you need to account for the opportunity cost of not investing the money you're paying into the mortgage in a stock market. Using the calculator here, over a period of 10 years with a measly S&P 500 annual return of 4.66% if you started out with 125k down payment and invested a mortgage payment of $3125 each month, you would have ended up with 927k. It seems to me that what you ought to be comparing is the growth of index funds (what most people should be investing in), and housing market in your area.

Regarding the example of people losing money selling a house in Detroit, it seems to me that by renting and investing the money you would have been putting into the mortgage, you are better able to diversify the risk of your housing area depreciating in price. However, there are areas that experiencing housing price growth better than stock market return, so there are advantages and disadvantages to renting vs. buying a house. By no means is it as clear-cut as you portray.

[1] https://dqydj.com/sp-500-dividend-reinvestment-and-periodic-...

It takes a pretty good return on an investment to make back what you lose on rent.

The point I'm making is that buying a house is an investment, and renting is not.

I've done both, I've rented for long periods of my life. In San Francisco, among other places. I've also bought two houses.

I wish I had seen the economics of buying much sooner, because renting is throwing money away. When I was younger I was comparing mortgage payments to rent, and it didn't seem to make much difference. But if I'd realized that rent is gone and mortgage payments come back, I'd have tried to buy much sooner.

Renting is more expensive than buying in every county I've ever lived, including SF. So the argument that you could rent and invest instead of buying doesn't make sense to me. If you can rent and invest, then you can buy and invest. As long as you can afford the down payment, which is the main barrier to entry.

In your example, I could end up with 927k, but you have to subtract your rent. If your rent is 3k/mo, then you'd have spent 375k on rent for a net return of 550k. And you had to pay both the 3k/mo investment and 3k/mo rent at the same time.

Chances are pretty good in some places that if you buy a house for 350k, after 10 years it will sell for 550k, and you could still afford the side 3k investment per month and get the 927k on top of it, for a total of ~1.4M.

It still seems really clear cut to me.

"When I sell my house I'm not getting back all my property taxes paid, interest paid ..."

Perhaps not - but you are deducting those from your taxes the entire time.

I have no comment to make about the appropriateness of the mortgage interest tax deduction. It exists and should be factored into your economic models.

Or the dividends from keeping your down payment in the stock market.