The NY Times buy vs. rent calculator in the article that he links, uses 3% as a baseline rent increase per year. So, after 5 years, a $1500 rent could be expected to cost $1740. That's not too impressive if you assume it's a place worth $375k and at his 2% taxes and maintenance price, you'd have $625 in costs in addition to the mortgage - well over the $240 that the rent had risen. However, after 15 years, that theoretical rent would have risen to $2300 and eclipsed the cost of taxes and maintenance. Now, as home values rise, taxes would rise with it, but then you own something that you can sell for more money and have made a good investment so it isn't a good argument to say, "well, one's home could go up in value a lot every year which would mean more taxes."

It depends on what you're buying a property for. Frankly, the NY Times calculator (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/business/buy-rent-calcula...) is going to be a lot better than my crude calculations. However, if you're buying a property to stay in for a good while, it can be a better idea to buy. The costs of selling don't matter that much when you've stayed in a place for a long time. It also depends on your market. I've priced things out in the Boston area against rent (more urban than Greenspun), and it really depends on how long you're going to stay in that place. Most of the cities here offer you a homestead exemption on your property taxes if you live there and it's usually around 200k - meaning that if you buy a place for $400k to live in rather than rent, you're actually only paying half the property tax rate. The towns tend not to have that exemption. So, if you want to be in one place for a decade, the calculator shows that buying can be a nice option.

Buying a house isn't something to go in for like buying an iPhone and getting a two-year cell phone contract. It requires a careful look at the costs and that you're relatively settled in life. It isn't a panacea of money, but it can be cheaper and can be stabilizing. While it isn't everyone, there are people who really like an area, have a job that won't see them have to move, and would stay in that house for 20-30 years.

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Plus, if you look at Trulia's rent-vs-buy index (http://trulia.movity.com/rentvsbuy/), you'll see that Greenspun has cherry-picked the worst cities to buy to do his calculations. Trulia notes that in 36 out of its 50 cities studied, it is "much less expensive to buy than rent". That includes real cities like Chicago, Wahsington DC, San Diego, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, and Atlanta. He's used a buy-to-rent ratio of 30:1, but the average for the 50 cities shown is 14.22. So, we live in the Boston area and buying here is an expensive proposition that might not make sense. However, there are many places that have much more favorable ownership conditions. If you're in a market where the buy-to-rent ratio is below 15:1, the NY Times calculator will show you how favorable buying is. And, frankly, that's most of the country. Where Greenspun and I live seems to be the exception, not the rule and his calculations are based on data that doesn't apply to most people. It applies to him and it applies to me based on where we live, but it probably isn't something that one should generalize to the country.