Renting vs. buying a home

If I tied to mortgage payments, I am less likely to try financially risky startup.

If I tied to the house I own, I'm less likely to move for the better job opportunity (or just closer to work to reduce my daily commute).

Another disadvantage of owning house is that all major repairs have to be paid by house owner.

On the other hand, it's much less likely that anybody would kick me out from my own house vs chances of my landlord kicking me out of the house I rent.

Another advantage of owning house is that owners have more control over the house than renters have (paint walls any color, having pets etc.). Neighborhood composition tend to be different around houses that are typically for rent and houses are typically for owners only.

"But prostitution is wrong!" So we make it illegal and cause prostitutes to get roughed up by pimps and Johns. They attract more diseases and end up straining our social support system.

"But drugs are bad for the community!" So we make drugs illegal and we have gang turf wars and a "fuck the police" vibe from the poorer areas of our cities. Tell me again, what was worse for the community?

"But I don't want to live in a city with lots of condos!" So we make it illegal to build new condos. Then a bunch of google employees start moving in and now the original votes are economically squeezed out.

"It isn't right that Wallmart's (or McDonalds, etc) employees require subsidies from the government!" So we raise minimum wage and (through perverse incentives and lobbying) cut welfare benefits to the partially employed. Minimum wage companies replace people with machines and the government gets higher unemployment and less productivity (since engineers are creating machines to replace the unskilled, instead of the skilled).

It's all the same thinking over and over again. An emotional appeal that has nothing to do with good policy. This is why Khan's video is so important. It reaches out to people and educates them without judgement. Talking to your friend he may feel like he needs to stick to his decision, otherwise his friends will see him as weak, but if he comes to these facts on his own maybe it will enlighten him.

A new roof and new coat of paint will already blow your budget. Your pipes will also need replacing after 30 years, as would your hot water heater, among a plethora of other expenses that come up.

This is a key point for me, though I'd list different specifics. I've owned a house for ~5 years but was a renter for my previous (post-undergraduate) adult life other than brief periods when I was living with my parents.

The great horror of renting is the typical case of renting in a multi-unit building, and has to do with two things: i) neighbors, and ii) landlord or their agent running the operation. Having neighbors sharing walls, floors and ceilings with you is problematic because the neighbors are inevitably noisy (and in some cases there are other nuisance problems like cigarette smoke leeching in). I'm the guy who pounded on the ceiling who you had to deal with. But I also appreciate your desire to be able to listen to music without having to worry about annoying the neighbors. Neighbors tend to be inconsiderate, and I theorize that this tendency, or the perception of this tendency, has increased, perhaps due to: (a) an influx of young middle class renters who themselves did not grow up as renters but as children in suburban homes, so don't understand the norms of good neighborly behavior; (b) a race to the bottom in apartment building construction leading to poor insulation from noise from other apartments.

Then there's the other part, having to deal with a landlord or property agent. I've found that the rise of the class of mega rental property owning businesses, which I see in growing suburban and exurban areas as well as in cities, is a big problem - essentially slumlord-like unscrupulous behavior has gotten extended to middle-class rental unit property. There also seems often to be high turnover in management of such rental properties which also causes problems. For examples read your average negative Yelp or apartmentratings.com review of rental properties in this category. You'll hear the same types of complaints over and over -- failure to respond to renter complaints, imposition of fees and rental raises at any opportunity, a general culture of treating renters with high disrespect.

Some of these problems seem not to be present to the same degree in multi-unit dwellings that are structured as condominiums or (common in New York) coops. As a kid I lived in a coop in NY for a while and my parents later lived in a coop in Manhattan where my mother still lives. The contrast is significant, even though it shouldn't be overstated (my mom's building is probably higher quality than the average Manhattan coop). You get a different set of people in an ownership-structured multi-unit development -- fewer noisy young people who grew up in suburban houses and are straight out of college, a tendency to have middle-aged or older people, quieter, more considerate, less likely to move and with more of a stake in the maintenance of collective quality. I rented a condo in a multi-unit building in Seattle some years ago after having rented in the sort of rental building I describe above and the difference was notable there, if not dramatic.

When I grumble about aspects of my current situation (basically related to the fact that I'm in an exurb and not an urban setting) I sometimes remind myself of what I used to have to experience as a renter, and it makes me feel a lot better.

[Edited to fix a couple of typos]

I think it is also wrong to generalize like that. There are renters who are disciplined enough to invest most of their "surplus of money" in appreciating assets. One can even invest in real estate without buying a home. Depending on location, a disciplined renter may well come out way ahead of the owner. IMO, that's a message that we should hear more often.