I'm definitely in the "rent over purchase" group, even though I could get a mortgage with good terms. I think people are a bit nervous to purchase a home after seeing what happened in 2008.
If I bought a 200k house, in 5 years I would have paid 43k in interest and still owe 180k on the mortgage (according to some amortization table I found), and probably many thousand more fixing stuff that breaks.
After 30 years I will have paid $164,813 in interest, so even if the house doubles in value it doesn't seem like a great investment.
Am I missing something? Maybe I'm not understanding it correctly but it doesn't seem like that great of a deal.