Is It Better to Rent or Buy?

Unless you're somehow securing multi-year leases, that's a cost that is passing on to you as well.

You also need to factor in the value of negative impacts of renting. When you have kids, school selection is driven by location -- and a lease is more ephemeral than a mortgage. You also always need to deal with landlords, who can be good or bad, and often cannot make changes to the property that you would like.

If you are in the states and are not in a place with an extremely well established rental market run by professional landlords, it is probably like that.

Of course, most places require that landlords give the tenant some amount of notice before entering the home (generally a day or so), but taping a notice to the renter's door that said "remodeling starts tomorrow and will last a month" would probably cover that.

Some states have renter's law that says something like "if your rental is unusable because of construction or damage or what have you" that you can seek "equivalent premises at the market rate" and bill your landlord, but I suspect if you do that you'd better start shopping for a new place to live and limbering up your small claims court documentation.

//edit

The bottom line in the states is that you probably have decent rental protection but will have to sue the guy you are buying a roof from if they don't voluntarily play nice.

If you demand walkable, then yes, you are up a creek. The only way to get purely walkable, with your grocer, theater, and night club all within a fifteen minute stroll, is high-density which generally happens in the heart of large cities, and is indeed expensive.

But how about bicycle-able? My town is about 5 miles square, very bike-able, and I was able to buy a townhouse at twenty-five.

This calculator ignores the fact that the market for real estate buyers is increasingly global but the rental market is local.

If you are in your 20's and grew up in a middle class family in Vancouver, Toronto, Sydney, Melbourne or Auckland, and have a middle class job, it is virtually impossible for you to be able to afford to buy a house in the city in which you grew up. E.g., here's a New Yorker article on the impact of the global property market in Vancouver: http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2014/05/26/140526ta_....

The political fallout from the intergenerational inequality over property ownership in Canada, Australia and NZ is going to be very interesting to watch...

"You buy a house tomorrow for $200k and want to sell it in 18 months because of a job opportunity or family emergency?"

Well it goes without saying (and this is always true for anything you read on the web, right?) that the specifics of each persons circumstances need to be taken into account.

Along those lines there are people that:

a) Own their own business so they aren't employed by anyone and don't have a job opportunity to consider.

b) Those in "a" have businesses that they intend to stick with and further may be tied down by either family or their wife's occupation (or children)

c) Have considerable assets or family they wouldn't have to bail out.

In any case along the lines of "family emergency" how would thinking of that situation allow anyone to ever take a chance or buy a house?

What about having a startup (as only one example) and then having a "family emergency"?

"Otherwise you're taking a $12,000-18,000 hit when you sell it"

The main problem that I had with this article's slant is that it tried to quantify things in a way that made you think that all that mattered were dollars. Not everyone thinks like that. Or cares if they were to lose 12 to 18k they'd rather be a homeowner and live in a community as a homeowner rather than a renter in either an apartment building (with more transient residents) or as a renter in a condo or even as a renter in a neighborhood. And they are willing to part with money in order to do that. Same way some people might decide to spend $5000 on a vacation or $50,000 for an airplane (when flying the airlines obviously is cheaper in most cases).