The same home could be rented for ~$4500 per month.

Keep in mind that most rented houses were purchased a while ago. If you bought the same house when it was $700K, you could still make a profit on a rent of $4500.

The reason why owning costs more is because buyers are also assuming appreciation. If you sell the same house for $1.5M 5 years later, you still make a nice profit even if your monthly cash flow is negative.

Also, once you hit 20% ownership, you no longer have to pay mortgage insurance.

I haven’t run the numbers lately to figure out which side wins, but the analysis is significantly more complicated than comparing monthly outlays in the first year.

That assumes that you can sell the house for more than what you bought it at.

You are correct that principle may be recouped and in addition, you get a mortgage interest tax deduction. However, you also pay 6% when you sell the place and maintenance costs (~1% per year) need to be accounted for.

There are several assumptions you need to make for owning to be cheaper than renting - that usually involves owning for a longer period of time (>5 years) and some modest appreciation (~3%+).

Of course, my numbers were from the SF market. There are many cities in the US where owning is cheaper than renting from day 1. SF just isn't one of those.

A good place to mention the NYTimes rent versus buy calculator: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/buy-rent-cal...

Not necessarily; as long as the value of the house[1] doesn’t fall more than the principal you’ve paid, you’ll get more cash from the sale than you put up as a down payment. The trouble with buying on margin, though, is that it amplifies losses— the worst single day in the stock market[2] was about a 20% drop, but you get the same effect from a 1% drop in your house value if you hold the 95% mortgage that you described.

  [1] Folding transaction fees into the effective value
  [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Monday_(1987)