I thought the logic was that, after say 30 years, you own the home you were making mortgage payments on.
My dad explained it to me best. He had bought a single-family house in Homer, Alaska after having moved up there and working in construction for a number of years. He had never owned a home in his life. He got a 30-year fixed loan. He said at the time he was questioning himself as to what he was doing — mortgage payments were something like $400 a month!
"Ten years on, you know what the monthly mortgage was?" he asked me. "$400 a month," was his (obvious) answer. He laughed when he said it because at the time that would have been peanuts for rent.
He wasn't there for the whole of 30 years but had enough equity in the home some years later that when he did sell it he was able to outright purchase land out East End and build a new home on it.
To be sure, times have changed — the market has changed (interest rates have changed of nothing else). But putting money toward ownership still seems like a win.
> My dad explained it to me best.
I'm glad you have a found memory of your dad explaining it to you, but this bunch of folk wisdom is killing is killing this country.
One has to actually run the numbers to see how all the things net out. I would start with https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/upshot/buy-rent-cal...
Of course to your point there's no telling if I had been renting and putting every extra dollar into the stock market if I might not have come out ahead. But realistically how many people "invest" in that manner with their income? I can tell you my blue-collar background had not raised me to be investment savvy. (I would have no idea what capital gains were until I was probably in my forties.) I suspect that for most people with similar upbringing an investment in their home is their only significant investment in their lifetime — or it was once that way.
(Who knew they were killing this country.)
I guess that one's out the window now as well then if they can't even afford that.
Unexpected repair and upkeep cost — you're suggesting the landlords just eat that?
(In my case I have learned to do repairs myself. That has been very liberating, FWIW.)
If I am following, your alternative is that we all become renters for life — using any extra money we have to invest in the stock market?
Ericson2314•1h ago
The only homeownership that is tolerable is multiunit (condos). The rest is a mess of terrible land use we lack the societal strength to prevent. The sooner we get away from our single family home fetish that prices people away from jobs, the better. We will all be fabulously wealthier once we do.
I'm glad the author of the piece understands this, and points out repeatedly that renting might not be that bad — better for the individual and better for society.
DaveZale•1h ago
I swore off renting and HOAs many years ago. But for city life, there's not much of a choice, absoulutely.
Ericson2314•57m ago
Single stair allowing narrower buildings side by side ameliorates them problem though, in that the units of coordination are much smaller.
chickenzzzzu•1h ago
The world simply needs less people. Trying to cram more people into less space is inhumane.
Ericson2314•54m ago
But the amount of population decline needed to give everyone American-style suburbs that are small enough to not have horrible commutes is....a lot.
If you go to Europe, you can see ~5 story density is not loud, not smelly, and not dangerous though. It's also not dangerous in America either (but loudness and smells are problems because we're dumb as shit about these things). So I dunno, you do you, but I in the city don't wanna subsidize your coddling in the myriad ways I do today.
chickenzzzzu•34m ago
Regarding horrible commutes, I for one believe that it is the companies who demand in person work who are the ones who are being coddled here with transport infrastructure. In reality, we need a two speed road network-- one for seriously heavy trucking, and the other for bikes. I have no problem giving up my personal car, if that's the angle you are going to take.
9rx•16m ago
Then stop...? Subsidies have an expected return on investment. If that isn't being realized, there is no reason for you to continue. I bet you won't, though. It is easy to say you don't want to give when it is nothing more than talk. Acting upon it, however, necessitates giving up what you get in return, and we both know you don't actually want to give that up.
wpm•13m ago
I live in a two flat. When I go outside, I am greeted by squirrels and the honey bees from next door (the lady keeps them to help her garden, which is beautiful). Large, lush trees line the block from and back. The only smells that waft over are the smells from other people's cooking.
The loudest nuisances are leaf blowers, loud cars, car horns, and dirt bikes. All things that occured at the same rate, if not more, in the single-family-home-only suburb I grew up in.
The most danger in my day to day life is caused by people in cars: driving too fast, not stopping and yielding when proper and required, and generally just being shit at piloting a vehicle. This was far more pronounced in the same suburb I grew up in, to the point of being so oppressive I couldn't really go anywhere without one.
Literally nothing about my "dense" living is loud (to an unreasonable degree), smelly (unless like, other people grilling chicken is offensive to you), or dangerous (vs the baseline rates at least).
No one should be forcing you to live in a "prison" like mine (where I can walk 5 minutes to an excellent grocery store or 10 minutes to a larger supermarket, god, the horror!), but you shouldn't be forcing me to live in a "prison" like a sprawled out SFH only suburb by encoding your preferences into zoning code and law. The simple fact is that more people prefer to live like I do, given what houses are going for around here, exacerbated all the more by the fact that if my neighborhood burned down, it would be *illegal* to build it back the way it exists now.
tomjakubowski•1m ago