you'd be surprised how much the market has moved my brother & his wife are expecting a kid and were looking at houses within 30min of Boston

the last place they lost a bidding war on was $600K.. for a 3bed/1bath 1000 sq foot.. well outside the city, went for 20% over ask.. crazy stuff

Somerville around Sullivan square. Was paying 3200 a month all in on a 1200 sq ft townhouse. Looked at a few of the homes around our street and they were selling for 700k-1million and off market in a few days after posting. This was all a few months before covid.

We found some places we could afford but they either made our commute fairly long(>1 hour each way), would stretch our budget to have zero tolerance for emergencies, or both

This describes my brothers situation pretty much.

People also have a lot of received wisdom of how they were brought up in the burbs and just assume you HAVE TO buy.

There's plenty of markets where prices/rent are upside down and you might as well rent indefinitely.

People forget you are either renting housing or renting money to "own" housing. If you are disciplined enough to save the difference, renting can be better in some markets. Mostly its HCOL coastal cities where people are accepting ridiculously low rental yield because they are banking on price appreciation.

If you don't know if you want to be in X location for the next 5.. probably more like 10 years, there's not always a solid reason to buy.

That was where we ended up on the math. We liked the idea of owning our own home and building equity in it, but the cost was too high and like you said, we couldn’t conclude we’d be in the area in even 2 years. Covid hitting a few months after we started looking also definitely helped solidify that opinion and things might have turned out differently if we didn’t have a worldwide plague causing me and my wife tons of uncertainty in the future