A mortgage as a tool is available to you. If you refuse to go into debt, is that societal failure? Affordability of housing is a serious issue, but I'm not sure expecting to buy property without debt is necessarily so.

It seems like a self-defeating position to take?

> I refuse to go into debt by taking out a loan for a house

But you are renting.

While renting isn't debt, it can be helpful to think of it as debt you have to pay every month (unless you plan to be homeless).

So you have 12N (where N is the number of years you think you might still live) of rent debt payments that you are committed to pay. If you transform that into mortgage payments, at least you're building equity. And it will only be 1230 payments (given a 30 year mortgage) so it is a bounded number unlike 12*N.

Not really, you can get out of paying rent easily, usually the maximum penalty is one extra month of rent, which won't break most middle class people.

It's not that simple to sell a house, and if real estate prices crash you're still on the hook for the several hundred thousand dollar difference.

> Not really, you can get out of paying rent easily

And then, what?

Unless you have a backup plan which allows you to live for free somewhere, you can't get out of paying someone for it. Whether rent or a mortgage.

For housing, it is most useful to plan long term and consider you have a lifetime of housing payments coming up. How can you minimize that lifetime total?