It primarily talks about the unfairness of the current system, the NIMBY problem reducing housing stock and the issue of regulations intended to curb new building reducing the stock of houses so that only the elite and existing homeowners can afford them.

The section on renting/alternatives is mainly just a discussion about alternatives to the current unfair approach and some cases where things work better.

That said the situation in most of the western world is insanity, If I want to buy a house in my hometown (Perth, Australia) I need a minimum 5% deposit + 3-5% stamp duty and the median house now costs 500k AUD.

Median salary is closer to 75k AUD, so you're looking at a mortgage of roughly 6 salary years and a deposit of at least 50k (if you have good credit and no debts).

Edit to add:

A 20% deposit is minimum to not have to pay a 'Mortgage insurance' which gets added to your mortgage to cover the bank if you default and is usually equivalent to the difference between your deposit and 20%.

Oh wow. I had to read the rest of your comment twice to understand that you were saying these seem high to you. They seemed really low to me. To put it into perspective, you need a 10-20% deposit in Belgium (depending on various factors) and there's a 6% tax for an old house (10% up until very recently) or 21% for a new house. It's basically impossible to buy a house if you're young or single or come from a poor family. I feel your pain.

A 20% deposit is minimum to not have to pay a 'Mortgage insurance' which gets added to your mortgage to cover the bank if you default.

Belgium sounds like an even more painful situation, sucks for those of us who would just like to have a stable place to live and be allowed to add some personal character to (not allowed in most rentals ive lived in)

This seems such a weird condition to add. Someone who doesn't earn much but saves up over 22 years for a house has to pay stamp duty on his first house, but someone privileged who can buy a house when 30 years old doesn't?

One of the major political parties here (Centre Party, the agrarian-liberal party) wants people to live outside of the cities. Finnish cities are so small that it's easy to commute from a place with plenty of cheap land and thus it's possible for most people to buy or build a house there if they want to.

Granted that Finland has a very different culture (disclaimer: I live in Sweden) and we aren't in the 50s anymore to invest heavily on a car-centric society but incentivising people to move away from city centres can have unpredictable consequences 20-50 years down the line.

In my country, if you're poor and if it's the first house you buy, you can ask a 0% tax loan from the government and use it to pay your stamp duty with it.

Correction: I double checked and it looks like it can be added to your mortgage, which isn't as bad up front.

Thanks!

One (of many) big issue(s) is that the past has seen unchecked claiming of land for new projects leading to an acute shortage of land, while lots of existing houses and buildings are entirely outdated.

We are talking about houses which are 60 or 70 years old typically located in densely pouplated urban agglomerations and haven't seen little to no remodeling whatsoever during that time. These are hardly isolated, difficult to heat, are entirely outdated in terms of utilities and plumbing and so on.

The idea behind the difference is to incentivize people to buy and renovate older, existing houses and curbing the further occupation / use of free & open space with new construction and urban sprawl.

It should be noted: Belgium is also a country with an incredibly complex fiscal system. There are taxes as well as tax breaks on every aspect of life. Belgium is a complex federal nation with many levels of government. To put that in perspective: it's a country with 6 different governments. All of which turn politics and policy making, unironically, into 5D chess. The fiscal system tends to be the arena where everything comes together, generally as a compromise which is often more founded on pragmatism then necessity.

Historically, home ownership has been, and still is, massively incentivized in Belgium. But just like everywhere else, soaring housing prices and an ageing population are causing issues for younger generations who can't buy property without financial help from their parents.

And so, young people find themselves in a bind. They can't just buy any property, market dynamics and public policies push them towards buying outdated property only to face long, drawn out and expensive renovation projects just to bring everything up to date with modern, strict construction codes.

I'm in a nearby country and this accurately describes my house. I gave up, we live in it, halfway renovated, crazy plumbing, mixed masonry, hairball electric panel, dangerous corners everywhere. Contractors are too expensive and the DIY spirit only goes so far when you're working parents.

Sorry if my first comment was a bit coy and unclear. Both ancestor comments are about Australia & Belgium. Google tells me that in Australia new properties are incentivized over old:

>Grant: First home buyers can access a $10,000 grant when purchasing or constructing a new home, regardless of how much the property is worth. Stamp duty concessions: The territory government provides an up to $18,601 Territory Home Owner Discount (THOD) on stamp duty costs for first-time buyers.

My Aussie friends tell me this changes frequently, that it also differs by state, but some sort of incentive to prefer new properties have been policy for a long time.

GP says that Belgium penalizes existing houses:

>a 6% tax for an old house (10% up until very recently)

So there aren't lower taxes on older properties in either country. You get a discount on the taxes only when you purchase a new property, which is an incentive in alignment with the interests of property developers.

The big problem in Australia is that nobody really in the government wants to do things to make houses more affordable. Anything that would immediately lower house prices would be a disaster for the political party and somewhat for the country. In fact the government has been doing all it can to keep house prices rising further and further.

First by adding a first-home-owners' grant, which just increased the prices of cheaper property, and most recently by allowing people to take money out of their retirement savings to buy a property. All this does is just add more fuel to the real estate market so prices would increase.

The only real way to lower prices would be for a genuine crash to happen, one where the government would be incapable of doing anything to prevent. The other would be to get rid of negative gearing, maybe just for existing property initially, so that people won't leverage up the eyeballs buying more and more investment properties.

I'm on a decent salary by Australian standards and am going to be waiting at least 2 more years before I can afford a 10% deposit (have been saving for several years already at a lower rate).

Just have to hope all the decent land/houses are still around by then and that the house prices dont outpace my savings.

Anyway. I just wanted to say that, and also, this issue is seemingly everywhere. I’ve been in Toronto Canada for over a decade now and prices have gone crazy for almost that entire time. When i arrived a house in the city was 350-400k, that same house today might fetch 1.6m, or if renovated I’ve seen them sell for as much as $3.8m

And now they’re building like crazy, with people leaving in droves. Hopefully that’ll depress prices long-term.

Consumer mortgage debt is directly correlated with housing prices in Canada. This plus constraints on permits for single family dwellings.

Drive around and have a look at some of the high end condo's at night - there are no lights on. Mostly dark.

The no capital gains and no inheritance tax loopholes in Canada will eventually be closed.

(https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/canada-popula...) percentage population growth 0.9% is very low based on historical standards.

Condo rents have absolutely tanked, by the way

Goddamn those are some crazy numbers, how does anyone even begin to afford that? You'd be saving for 20 years just for a deposit....

Somehow there was only a small dip in prices during the pandemic and now the property market is back on the boil again.

I honestly don't think any family without high dual incomes can actually afford a home now close to the city. The only places that are close to affordable for middle income families are far away from the centre.

I get that not everyone can do it, but it's a possibility for more sanity in house ownership for a groups. Unfortunately that also allows Melbourne market to not crash for longer...

So basically, as long as regional towns keep up with development and infrastructure, the overall result may not be a crash, but rather slow exodus from the cities. Now if only transport/trains would keep up with the times...

There are other ways of looking at it where you are correct.

It’ll balance out when our lifespans max out somewhere (perhaps never?), and productivity is improving with technology as well, likely helping the situation somewhat.

This is not the only factor however.

The solution to the "problem of home ownership" is to stop making areas undesirable places to live. Portland springs to mind but there's San Fran. NYC, L.A. but it's not just the Big Blue cities in the US and elsewhere, it's nations run by totalitarians everywhere.

The solution is to export prosperity around the world. Then we can all enjoy the benefits of the developed world's population crash which translates into cheaper housing, amongst other things, both good and bad.

Since The Economist is looking everywhere for the West's biggest mistake, today's their lucky day, I happen to have it right here.

The West should have demanded of China and every other non-democratic regime in the world, as a condition of receiving manufacturing and industries and the privilege of importing their products duty-free, that they liberalize their political systems in ways which are hard to reverse.

This had the power to transform regions from Mexico and Central America to China.

We could have created a schedule of increasingly substantive requirements composed of democratic institutions, free speech and political assembly, (truly) free markets and anti-corruption metrics which had to be met in order to benefit from trade with the West. But we didn't.

We didn't because a small group of industry beneficiaries made small and large fortunes by outsourcing the West's industrialization. They leveraged the lack of environmental and labor standards endured by the world's poor, living under corrupt and totalitarian regimes, to lower the cost of goods sold then sell back into the first world at first world prices.

That's what the elite have been doing since Clinton gave China MFN status and even before.

Now no one in the West can afford the most basic thing every mammal requires- a place of their own. A home. A burrow. A nest. A place to which they can retreat, which they can control and experience sheer animal comfort and safety. Now even that has to go to satiate the boundless greed of our elites.

The only thing left for them to come after is reproduction. We should probably also start thinking about turning our mates over to them, since they can provide for them better than we can.

Good macroeconomic policy (like international trade agreements) can be used to push back against this trend somewhat.

Indeed, well before.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_republic

And usually, families try to buy about 1 plot of land for each child typically.

I think that, no matter where you are in the world, land is an important asset. A place to live, a house to cover your head, reduces a lot of stress in life.

In India, there are three things considered first and foremost in life "Roti, Kapda Makaan".

Roti - Food Kapda - Clothing Makaaan - House.

Loan tenures are about 25 years, so most families take a home and pay the loans during their active service life.

About 10 or 15 years down the line, one or two floors are added to tge house, for rental purpose. Here too, rental is less than half of construction cost. Again, intent is for very long term appreciation of the asset, rather than a passive income source.

[citation needed]

As it turns out, this is not the case:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/187576/housing-units-occ...

FTSE100 appears to have doubled in 20 years, my house in a poor UK city has quadrupled in value. Starting wages have increased by about 70%.

edit: Also Myth 5 in the following article.

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/et-explains/six-my...

Edit 2: An 1800 sft, duplex house, built in a 150 square yard property, cost about Rs. 13 million. And that is in a city like Hyderabad. Costs about double that in Bangalore, the top IT city in India and probably more in a city like Mumbai & New Delhi.

An average salary of an IT employee, with about 10 years of experience is about Rs. 3 million per year. Banks give a loan of about Rs. 10 million on that house, and employees usually source the remaining amount from further loans or high interest borrowings. Cumulatively, with current interest rates (have been stable for a decade now), EMI on a 13 million loan is about 0.13 million per month, meaning more than half of an employees salary, 1.56 million, goes to EMI payments.

Average rental value for that property is about Rs. 25000 per month, or Rs. 0.3 million per year. So hardly enough for covering EMI. Tenure on the loan is usually 20 to 30 years.

So, for most families, with wife and husband working, owning one house is within reach, but two is beyond capacity. With so much of income going to EMI, most choose to stay in the house rather than rent it out.

Another reason is lack teeth in laws that implement rental agreements. In fact, most owners hardly take any rental agreements or leases.

This must be great for people who like to move around a lot.

I don't disagree with you, but owning your own home can also be a step towards financial ruin if you choose the wrong home. I know a few people who bought homes that they ended up losing huge amounts of money on and selling a few years later. Beyond that, it's also a commitment that comes with a huge opportunity cost. If I buy I house in Texas and later there's an opportunity in Oregon, I've got to deal with the house first before I can take the opportunity in Oregon. Lastly, the math doesn't always add up. Sometimes it makes more financial sense to rent (at least temporarily) than to own, but you have to do the math for your own situation.

That might be part of the problem? It's extremely rare to make a profit selling a home less than 5 years after you bought it even in good-but-not-insane markets. Basically unheard of in under 3 years in not-insane markets. If the market slips you're easily looking at 7-8 years to break even. The math of a six-figure, three-decade loan just doesn't support quick flips even just to break even, and most people are way too proud to sell something for break even 5 years after they bought. Add in maintenance and it's easy to see how if you let that slip you can be on the losing end of a sale even 5-6 years later.

She bought a new built flat about 5 years ago in the outskirts of London. Following the Grenfell disaster it has gotten caught up in the inspections for fire safety and is now practically worthless until ~£70k worth of remedial works are carried out. She cannot remortgage it, she can't rent it out and she can't sell it. Pretty nasty scenario.

In Czech Republic you actually own a share of the whole building and the land it stands on.

I will never buy an apartment from reasons mentioned above. Just way too risky, at least with my own house it would be up to me what gets done and what doesn't.

If you want to buy a place to live so you don't have to work for a Lord, you want affordable housing. If you have a property which you want to be an investment, you want housing prices to baloon.

Currently the latter is winning.

If your argument is about splitting up land use by building higher, it still is true. At the end of the day, that land became more expensive and you are less able to purchase the land.

Appreciating asset and affordability are opposites by definition.

Aesthetic sentiments aside, those office buildings bring stress to the local infrastructure in many ways.

One win however is that local businesses that serve food and drinks at least survive which is not a small win during COVID-19 times.

Private property ownership and intergenerational wealth transfer is the foundation of middle class, and bigger middle class leads to better education for the masses, and a more democratic society!

Add up all the money you have spent on rent and mortgage payments and pretend it just never happened. It's life changing to have that.

I see it as problematic. Keeps the ground unlevel.

An interesting solution is to decouple the price of the house from the price of the land it stands on, and then the government could rent the land and use that income instead of other taxes. Better description of this idea is here:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-progr...

The difference as you go down the wealth classes hits a point of, being able to afford a home at all or never being able to purchase a home.

Historically, housing has actually been a poor investment relative to investing in the stock market. Most people simply didn't know how or whether to invest, but nowadays investment vehicles like index funds and target date funds make that relatively straightforward.

We should be discouraging housing as investment so affordable housing can be a thing that exists and the housing market can respond to demand by building out the supply at levels people can afford while also encouraging people to sock away at least 5-15% of every paycheck into passively managed investment vehicles that have way higher long term returns than housing ever did.

The current situation is that we subsidize the middle and upper classes in terms of housing at the expense of the poor and those just starting out by artificially and unnecessarily pushing up the price of housing and constraining supply.

Even if you wanted to think of housing as an investment, it should be compared not to the stock market but to the lifelong cost of renting, since it's one or the other (unless you plan to be homeless).

I totally agree. It's obvious to me that home ownership is what allows the existence of a "middle class". That makes it a target for some interests.

If we choose to make having a home a priority, then we need to choose affordability both so that people are less likely to be homeless and so that people can do other thing with their money.

This is because homelessness is a side-effect of mental illness and drug addiction. The later is not all drug addiction, ( I used to live next to an "invisible" heroin addict which we only learned about when he OD'd) it's a certain type of disorganized-thinking and lifestyle which some addicts manifest.

The cost of housing doesn't cause homelessness; it causes roommates and the conflicts and violence and chaos that imposes on people's lives which is significant if under-studied.

The above assumes that you actually pay the house off of course. Many people don't.

It's impossible for a home to not be wealth, unless somehow infinite houses could be built for free.

So an argument can be had on how much wealth it should be and who gets to define that, but it is inescapable that it has some value.

Everyone striving to own a home is a consistent scenario, which has pros and cons.

Social housing that's owned by nobody/everybody is a consistent scenario, which has pros and cons.

Having some paying rent to others who own (or, even worse, have buy-to-let mortgages), is inherently unjust.

Why is it inherently unjust? The owner paid to have the building constructed. That took upfront capital. Asking the renter to pay for the use of this capital doesn't sound unjust to me.

Is renting out a car you purchased inherently unjust?

Much of the rent paid in big cities is not for the construction or maintenance costs, but the land value. Did the owner construct the land?

The land itself had to be acquired somehow. The very first owner paid for an army to take the land from the indigenous population that "owned" it, and that "cost" is a chain that is linked all the way to today (and at every step of the transaction, somebody profits by increasing the price a bit).

So either you raise another army today (at an even greater cost) to acquire the land, or you pay the asking price from the current owners.

No. People don't raise armies to steal land that's worthless. If you're going back to pre-history then the land near a nice river that has plenty of game, isn't predated by larger animals, and has nice fruit trees is worth way more to a person than some section of desert.

If right to live on land also goes with rights to exploit resources beneath the land then disparities in value as you approach the industrial era become massive.

You start with a place with nice fruit trees near the river, then a few people build their houses there, then someone builds roads and a port, then someone builds larger houses, then someone builds factories... and at some moment in the future, there is a huge city, but the river is poluted and the trees were cut down.

There is another place with no trees and no river. Hundred years later, there is no city.

The key thing to note is that this isn't the only model of land ownership possible. There are other that are more fair (land value taxes and community land trusts for example).

To be clear, I don't really have anything against individual landowners; it's the system that's unjust.

Heh, I wasn't taking a position on renting versus ownership. I said there are pros and cons of both.

What is unjust is to advocate for renting, if that rent will go to an owner/landlord. After all, why should owners/landlords exist at all, if renting is apparently so good?

Social housing avoids this hypocrisy, since the "owner" is not a person (or person-surrogate, like a corporation).

Like the housing projects in the inner cities?

The problem with US housing projects isn’t that they are social housing but that they are deliberate concentration of the poor (and therefore also marginalized, as those are correlated), with the same consequences that always has, whether or not it involves social housing.

AFAIK those planning such projects did not themselves live in social housing (unlike, say, many soviet officials), hence there's still an element of hypocrisy there (note that I never claimed otherwise; I specifically chose the word "this" in the sentence you've quoted. I'll also re-re-state that I've not made any argument for or against home ownership or renting)

See here, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidized_housing_in_the_Unit...

I paid off a house a few years ago. My flexibility with work and money went way up. I personally went from 10k CC debt and a house mortgage to well over a million in assets and rotating debt (for points) in a very short period of time. I did not really change my lifestyle at all. I went from planning out how to buy small items (which is normal BTW) to mostly 'do no think too much about it'.

Financial freedom was once put to me by an interesting 'when you feel like it' ladder. 1 eat whatever you want 2 buy whatever cloths you like 3 buy nice electronics whenever you feel like it 4 buy a used car with cash 5 buy a nice used car with cash 6 buy a nice new car with cash 7 travel whenever you like, and stay at an OK hotel 8 travel wherever you like, and stay at a nice resort 9 ...

I am somewhere between 5 and 6 now. Had a bit of a setback and slid back to 4/5 a few years ago. 5/6 is normal for my point in life I am at with my income. If I had less income that ladder is slower to go up. Also as you go up cash becomes less of 'how do I get more' and more 'how do I use this to buy me time'. My level up to 5/6 only happened because I paid off that house. My setback is because of a choice to move somewhere else.

But think about it this way. Whatever your rent/mortgage is. Think of having that amount of extra cash per month. Think how quickly you could use that to level up if you kept a similar lifestyle you have now.

Financial freedom is a matter of perspective on how you view material wealth. Some people never feel free because they are always looking to ladder up. Some people are fine at the low levels because they see material wealth as a burden.

I live in a high COL area, when I moved out when I was 20 rent was more than half of my income. I'd get raises but my rent would continue to climb. 5 years ago I bought a house, my rent stopped climbing. Now I can't even get a apartment for 125% of my mortgage and that is without a yard, with neighbors a half inch of sheet rock away, and no equity.

This means that while yes I still have to work, it isn't the end of the world that I get fired or miss a promotion. I no longer need to push hard to drive up my income like I did when I was in a apartment. So now I have more options, when a PM screws the pooch and misses a requirement I attend my daughters soccer game as planned instead of staying late.

If that isn't freedom I don't know what is.

There are safety nets for big things - not always good ones, but they exist everywhere and so when something major goes wrong you can count on some help. However there are a lot of little things that are both far more likely to go wrong, and also things that it is harder to get help with from any sort of safety net.

The 'they' you rail against who are amassing properties as massively subsidised wealth accumulators are exactly who this article is arguing against. Deregulate, open up the markets and let people decide on their investments of choice in a competitive environment. Are you really arguing that?

When you file taxes, you can take the "standard deduction" that everyone gets. A downward adjustment to the amount of your income that is taxable. Or you can "itemize" your various tax breaks, if they add up to a total greater than the standard deduction.

Historically, home ownership has been "subsidized" in the sense that the interest one pays on mortgage loans is one of the things that can be itemized. And historically, that was usually enough to push you above the standard deduction amount.

But now, the standard deduction amount has been raised to such a high level that only the wealthy and very upper-middle class have any reason to itemize anymore. Typical mortgages now are no longer enough to get you any special treatment on taxes, beyond a renter who also takes the standard deduction.

Of course, this outdated talking point will probably stick around for years, though...

Interestingly, Georgism agrees with you: the problem is that since land appreciates in value (as the supply is fixed and demand increases), there is an incentive to hoard it speculatively. George proposes a high land tax to negate land appreciation, and make it so it is only profitable to own land if it is effectively used (to live or to produce on).

Having corporations own land instead of individuals is just about the worse compromise that can be made.

You can extend it to pollution. Polluting is taking some of a common resource (the environment) from everyone else, so polluters should compensate society proportionately.

You could even extend it to network effects in tech. If you have users just because you were first and made it hard to leave, that's something unearned you took from society that you should compensate us for. I think this one is more of a stretch and sadly probably wrong.

The problem starts when people view their homes as financial investments instead of lifestyle security.

Here in London, rent is <50% of mortgage payments on an equivalent property.

I think everyone would agree that that is not financial freedom, but it's commonly accepted and taught that your rent/mortgage shouldn't be more than 30% of your take home.

I moved to a MCOL city where my mortgage is <20%. my salary

The core problem is that once you have a majority of the population owning an asset, they're incentivized to pull the ladder up behind them, and make it difficult for the non-landed to also buy the asset, to make the value of their asset go up.

> Owning your own home is, in my view, the first step towards financial freedom.

Sure, for those lucky enough to be able to buy a home before it gets too expensive. What about those not lucky enough to do so? Do they not deserve financial freedom?

There is nothing about the previous "landed" status of my neighbors that will affect the value of my property. Not to mention, if you're seeking to reside, not speculate, the "value" of the property is kinda immaterial.

Suppose everyone who wanted to had the ability to own land in New York (obviously not possible geometrically, but for sake of argument). Do you think that property in New York would still be worth the same?

Land only has a buying price/rent because there is an unmet demand. This is a principle economists realized centuries ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_rent

> Not to mention, if you're seeking to reside, not speculate, the "value" of the property is kinda immaterial.

The modern property ownership system basically forces homeowners to be speculators. If you have to pay hundreds of thousands (or even millions!) to buy a home, are you really going to be okay if it takes a massive hit (or doesn't go up in value as much as expected)?

New York is a port. Ports become cities, because access to the rest of the area is kind of needed to access the rest of the area. Ports are valuable.

> If you have to pay hundreds of thousands (or even millions!) to buy a home, are you really going to be okay if it takes a massive hit (or doesn't go up in value as much as expected)?

Unrealized losses aren't real losses. It's one of the things that confuses me about cars as well. I buy a car, I drive it for as long as possible. I'm not looking to resell it. Same with property. As long as when I sell it, I'm not losing money to sell it, I'm good. Because I'm not selling to make money, I'm selling to divest myself of the obligation of ownership for some reason.

And it's important to note that I said that I'm not losing money to sell it. If I owe on it, I want to sell it for enough to cover that and any closing costs on my end. Other than that, I don't really care. I'm not a real estate investor.

Sorry, I'm completely lost as to your point here. My point is simply that land is valuable because it is scarce, and its value is the difference in productivity between the given land and the best free land. From that, it follows that if land values are high, there's a massive difference in productivity between high value land and the best free land.

> Other than that, I don't really care. I'm not a real estate investor.

It's great that you don't but your view isn't the majority view. Homeownership is considered as a way to build wealth for the middle class, and this view is pervasive. This is pretty much said all the time, everywhere ("homeownership wealth", "intergenerational wealth", "buying a home is a good investment" etc.), by both politicians and the finance industry, so I'm surprised you don't think this is the case.

I'll give a concrete example though. A member of Parliament responsible for housing policy (Adam Vaughan) was asked if a 10% drop in house prices (after a year of ~30% rises) would be acceptable, and his answer was no, because "We know that Canadians rely on home ownership to secure their place in the economy now, but also as they retire". I doubt his view his uncommon either. He's simply stating what homeowners (who are the majority) think.

Because housing security is also inherently valuable.

Also, what's to make the words of Canadian parliament the truth? Does he not have a vested interest in a certain outcome? Residential home owners aren't looking to "wealth" when they buy a house. They're looking for residence.

You can make the property you own hard to buy or easy to buy; that's obviously up to you. The problem is that landowners pass laws that make it difficult for prospective owners to buy any property or for current owners to build new units on the land they already own. This is fundamentally illegitimate, but unfortunately it's very popular.

With real estate "location location location". In some areas there are situations that will make one or the other better. Everybody has their own life goals, and that in turn will feed into what is better for you.

For a while, usually yes. Long term, no chance.

A mortgage can only ever go down. Rents most of the time only go up.

My mortgage was initially over 3K while rent had been ~1.5K. But years later, those equivalent rents are ~5K and my mortgage is under $1K. In a couple decades when I'm retired, who know how high those rents will be? But I know exactly what my mortgage will be, $0.

So just the rent vs mortgage comparison (or rent vs no rent) is misleading at best, downright fraudulent at worst.

The thing is, a landlord isn't likely to continue renting out if they're losing money. Typically, the money for services, maintenance, etc. comes from rent.

The renter is indirectly paying for those, otherwise the landlord would be out of business.

Approximately never are any of those costs taken care of by the landlord! The renter is paying for them, plus a profit margin for the landlord. That's what rent is. The landlord isn't running a charity.

Only exception is if you luck into a rental by someone who paid off the property long ago and doesn't care to charge market prices for it.

You are absolutely correct, mate.

The flaw the assumption is that somehow 'buying' a home that is 15x your annual salary, that takes your entire life to pay off, is some kind of 'freedom'.

A mortgage is debt, yes. However the money you put into the mortgage is wealth that you're slowly accruing. If you're just renting a property someone else owns you're not accruing anything at all. No one thinks that taking on a 20-30 year debt is a good thing. People only do it out of necessity.

Housing that costs half as much as it does today, and doesn't grow faster than consumer price inflation?

"just pay someone else's mortgage instead?" - it has nothing to do with what the owner of the property is doing with their money. If rent is a more viable option, then rent.

Ontario, Canada has a soft kind of rent control that works somewhat well for renting, that's an option.

Including housing in inflation calculations would be another 'option' because very low interest rates create bubbles.

Focusing on affordability in zoning.

Taxing rental income.

Taxing homes sales over a certain price.

Increasing or reducing property taxes.

There are a million variables to make the housing situation work better and crude 'own vs. rent' statements without arguments are not going to help.

I think they're only looking at it from a financial freedom point of view. But I, too, don't see a 30-year keeps-with-inflation anchor as freedom.