You can't live in your stock portfolio.
Of course you can. You sell or harvest dividends. The same as living in an investment property forces you to give up its cash yield.
If the stock market crash, you can't do anything useful with your stock portfolio.
If the housing market crash, you can do something useful with the house: live in it.
I don't argue that you can rent with the yield of your portfolio. I'm just saying that when the music stops, a house is useful and a portfolio of stock isn't.
So to me, owning a house is worth it over having a souped up stock portfolio. And if you rent out your house, even if in a high CoL area like the SF Bay area, the long term yield can be comparable to a stock portfolio. And during that time, you have an anchor in one of the most economically productive area of the world.
But then you're not owning anything and renting it out, which was what the GGP was talking about.
If you can somehow do that, sure! If you can get a service below market rates, take advantage.
But surely it's obvious that by definition, very few people are going to be able to luck into such a position. So it's not broadly applicable advise.
> renting $1800/mo in Palo Alto [...] and they aren't raising rent on me
That's the deal of the century in terms of housing. Yes you're way better off renting on those terms. Since nobody else can find a rent so low in Palo Alto, let alone one that won't go up, for most people reality is different.
But then you're not buying any property and renting it out, which was what the GGP was talking about.
That post was not made in a vacuum. It was made in response to a particular claim, which was not as simple as "oh, sure, you can own stocks and pay your rent out of the dividends".
That seems really cheap for Palo Alto.