Just own the damn robots

Obviously this varies per market, but rents do not have to match housing prices in areas. Most people in the US are adverse to renting, so hot housing markets tend to push renters to buy "while they can still afford it," which seems to seriously depress the rental market. The bulk of my rent increases came in 2014 & 2015, after that, it stabilized, then went down (while housing went up-up-up).

Property taxes have exploded in my area though. Looking at Zillow, the taxes on a now $330k house is ~$6000/yr where it was more typically low ~4000s in 2012. So a solid 10%pa growth. (And $6000+ local taxes is probably still less than the standard deduction for a couple, so there's no tax benefits here). So, while your mortgage may have stayed constant, your monthly tax bill increased by ~$180.

Factoring in property taxes, HOAs, maintenance, improvements, utility costs, etc, it looks so hard to come out ahead buying. Really, the big factor is if you need more than 1200sq feet, then its cost effective to buy, since big apartments are rare and expensive. But if you can live comfortably with 1200sq ft, renting is a no-brainer, financially.

But the crux of my calculus depends on area, if I didn't need to live in this specific area to be <20m from work, then I could spend drastically less on housing. But as it stands, the good jobs are all concentrated in a few very expensive areas. But lucky for me, expensive housing doesn't translated to similarly expensive rent. So a 100% increase in housing prices translates to a 20-30% increase in rent prices.

I greatly enjoyed your analysis and appreciate the time you spent making it, but I reject this premise as a matter of theory. The intent of communism was to create a distributed system of governance in which workers would delegate some of their number as administrators, who were subject to recall at any time and who were expected to both legislate and administrate. These conditions obtained in the USSR for a short time after the 1917 revolutions but fell apart under two pressures: the Russian civil war, in which dispossessed aristocrats and armies from other countries teamed up to attack the new worker's state, necessitating total mobilization of the economy for war; and following Lenin's death, Stalin's seizure of power and exile of Trotsky. Stalin, as we know, went on to purge political enemies left and right, and then implement an appallingly cynical pact with Hitler to carve up Poland. (In contrast, Trotsky and Lenin had hoped to systematize the Russian revolution and then support similar uprisings in Germany, France, and other industrial powers of the time.)

Clearly there was something structurally wrong about the way the Russians implemented their scheme of governance that made it vulnerable to authoritarian takeover. I'm not an expert, but my personal take is that in both Russia and to some extent in China, the combination of a primarily agrarian economy and the lack of a democratic or capitalistic tradition made authoritarian subversion far more likely; Marx was correct about the necessity of a primarily industrialized society as a necessary precondition for communism, and he would have pointed to the capital-intensive nature of modern agribusiness in the US as the inevitable consequence of same. You might be surprised o learn that prior to his exily Trotsky had been engaged in a battle of ideas with Stalin where Trotsky was arguing for the maintenance of markets in grain and agricultural equipment because he considered market mechanisms superior to central planning and much more likely to reflect the goals of the people doing the work. Had his advice been heeded, at least one disastrous famine might have been avoided.

Anyway, if you are wanting to move away from capitalism and not toward anarchy

But anarchy is the end goal of communism - the withering away fo the state, and its replacement by voluntary mutualism, abundance through industrial production, and an equitable distribution of time with the goal of minimizing work and maximizing freedom. This is anarchy in the definitional sense of 'without rulers' as opposed to the propagandistic sense of general mayhem and disorder. The internet qua self-routing persistent network was/is anarchic in many respects; sadly I don't have a general theory of distribution v. resource concentration that allows for concentrations of resources for industrial production without concentrations of authority or its proxies - yet.

Apologies if this seems nitpicky. but to begin from the premise that communism is about increasing state control without acknowledging the explicit aim (in the Communist Manifesto, no less) of deconstructing state power undermines your whole argument, notwithstanding your many correct observations.