I don't know who you think ends up paying for maintenance and taxes in a rented property - it's the renter, through their rent.
Equally correctly, the landlord pays them, and landlords that can't at market rents on top of any purchase financing that they are still paying go out of the landlord business.
Most precisely, where, as is usually the case, neither supply nor demand are either haveperfectly elastic or inelastic, the costs are effectively split between renters and landlords in some ratio; the market rents are higher but the financial profits are lower than they would be if the costs involved were not a factor.
What I’m saying is that you don’t (usually) get to buy a house for $0 down. So it’s never a choice of $2000/mo for rent vs $1000/mo for mortgage. It’s more like $20k cash + $2000/mo for rent vs $20k equity + $1000/mo mortgage. Over long enough time horizons the monthly payments don’t matter and it’s a question of which investment appreciates more.
Even if your mortgage interest is greater than property value appreciation you could conditionally still come out ahead as compared to the available alternatives.
Diversity, leverage, better appreciation: if you're not already wealthy you can really only pick 1 (maybe 2) out of the 3.
And this ignores the value of having stable monthly living expenses, something not otherwise possible without rent control. You can of course buy cheap land, but such places are typically remote from employment opportunities and, while possible, that approach is just another form of speculation--people will readily share stories about living in the country and telecommuting to a high paying job (successful speculation), but few would ever discuss how they ended up stuck in a cycle of minimum wage employment (unsuccessful speculation).
That's wrong - the futures market is easily available if you have $10k, and offers rock-bottom costs for embedded leverage due to arbitrageurs. It varies based on the contract in question, but the two-year treasury futures contract offers roughly 400x leverage. Generally they offer you as much leverage as you can handle before overnight price moves will eventually wipe you out, so you definitely want to use less than they're offering.
But what's your exposure? Home mortgages are almost always non-recourse loans, limiting your losses to your initial down payment.
I don't think speculation in the futures market is a very good justification to the argument that home ownership is in general a poor investment--IME the conventional thinking in economic circles. I stand by my larger point that home ownership is a categorically sub-par investment only for those already with substantial wealth.
If you pay 20% down plus 4% upfront in closing costs on a $1 million dwelling, and then pay mortgage of $3,800/mo (which is fairly realistic for a conventional loan), it'll be more than 5 years before you break even, in liquid capital and presuming nothing is extracted from equity and ignoring any property maintenance costs that landlords have that would be rolled into rent for most renters, with a renter paying $7,600 for a similar dwelling which would actually represent a quite high rental yield.
If I pay $2000 a month rent I'm always going to have less liquid capital than if I pay $1000 a month mortgage, aren't I? The mortgage payer ties up their money in the equity so it's not liquid, but the rent payer's money is just gone, so it's infinitely not liquid, and on top of that more of their money is gone.
When you've paid off the mortgage the mortgage payer has more liquid capital, and a property.