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Comment by kibwen | Hacker News Reader

> The Flexibility of Renting Is Undervalued

And the stability of buying is undervalued. It's telling that this article frames housing as an investment vehicle rather than as a basic necessity. And it's not just a necessity because it shelters you from the elements and gives you storage for your stuff; it anchors you in a neighborhood and allows you to begin forming a local community. The flexibility of renting that this article glorifies is itself anathema to knowing and befriending your neighbors on anything but the shortest of terms; even if you don't intend to move, you have no guarantee that they won't up and exercise that flexibility. This is a major contributor to the modern loneliness epidemic.

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I don't know many homeowners who formed "local communities" with their neighbors. I know a few, but not many. And I know renters who know all their neighbors well. Seems more like a personality trait than something enabled by owning where you live.

100% this - it is exception, small exception that communities can be formed with neighbours. take home-owners associations into the equation and there is higher likelyhood you’ll punch someone than have a beer with them

0% this - neighborhoods with single family homes are more likely to have families, and kids often create friendships that carry over to parent friendships. And if anybody in the neighborhood takes the initiative to plan block parties, dinner parties, etc., that really helps a community take root.

This just doesn't happen as often with apartments, where people are more transient and more likely to be single and/or childless.

Only in places with non family friendly apartments.

80% of Eastern Europe, for example, would disagree with you.

I am strictly talking about USA and I believe this entire thread is. I am originally from Eastern Europe, grew up in a 12-story building and can still recipe names of pretty much everyone that lived in the building when I left in 1992. Not only in that building but also a 10-story adjecent building :)

This really just depends on the city. These kinds of generalizations just don’t hold for different cities with different cultures of community. I, for one, spent my entire childhood living in apartments, as did everyone I knew (and probably almost everyone does in large cities) and now am raising my own family in an apartment in a neighborhood with lots of other families. This kind of living is the norm in many places.

Having kids (and being in a neighborhood with kids) also helps a lot.

I don’t know. The effect of many families with young children all going and buying a house at roughly the same time is absolutely a thing. My street was filled with children when I was young (newly built neighborhood), and the same thing is true again now that I’ve bought a house. The street is filled with parents and children at roughly the same place in life. It’s nice when the only thing you need to do to find playmates is make noise in the street.

I'm confused... How do young families coordinate where and when to buy a house with their cohort?

Subdivisions of starter homes (defined both by size and price) tend to attract young families

I think it’s more that that cohort is very likely to be looking at houses at the same time, and value the same kinds of things, so naturally they end up in the same place.

Our place is ‘far’ (10m walk, this is Tokyo) from the nearest supermarket, a bit small, but it’s also connected to a tiny street that allows kids to play safely, 20s walk to the kindergarden, 5m walk to elementary school, and there’s parks around everywhere. Apparently those are things that a lot of young parents value ;)

My building has a building association and we have meetings and also group events. When we were robbed our neighbours were there to help us. I definitely feel part of my community in my building. I think partly it is Dutch culture. I didn’t feel welcome at all by my neighbours in Norway in any of the neighbourhoods I lived in. I don’t think it’s just a personality thing.

Much of this is location dependent. I’ve rented (and owned) in neighborhoods with really strong communities where everybody knew each other; and I’ve rented in neighborhoods where no one knew each other and people got suspicious if you tried to talk to them.

I owned for the last 25 years (3 houses, 8, 8 and 9 years) and am very social person. I do not have a single neighbour friend in all these years. what you are describing is (in vast majority of cases especially in urban areas) just wishful thinking.

yes, because he forgot about the car. The reason we don’t befriend our neighbors is because as soon as we leave our home, we put ourselves in a metal cage, ensuring no one will talk to us if we don’t want them to.

Befriending your neighbors kind of works in a city but only REALLY works in Amish communities.

Disagree that it's wishful thinking. Making friends with your neighbors requires a commitment to community - it has less to do with being a social person and more to do with recognizing the mutual benefits.

Making friends with your neighbors requires a commitment to community

I can make all the commitment I want to date Beyonce but at the end of the day it takes two to dance :)

This was also our experience while owning three homes in single-family neighborhoods over a 35-year period. We knew our neighbors enough to say "hello", but that was it, and we never associated with them. However, 13 years ago we bought an apartment in a large high-rise condominium building. To our surprise - because that was not a consideration when we moved - we have made many good friends among our neighbors. We go out to dinner together, we invite each other to our homes and to family celebrations. The downside is an aspect of communal living. For example, we needed a new carpet in the building's lobby, so all the owners voted on the color. The majority chose green and we hate green, but we have to live with it.

Counterpoint in Seattle - We talk to our neighbors regularly and are good friends with a few. Having kids helps.

No doubt there are many counter-points. My Godfather lives 4 miles from me and lives in a community where 3-4 of his neighbours have his house keys, take care of each other’s kids, dogs when out of town… I just don’t think - in general - that there is a statistically significant correlation between home ownership and living in a community like OP and you are describing

As a renter who has recently been given notice that I must vacate my apartment in 90 days, you'd think I'd agree with you.

However, I think this depends highly on the personality of the renter/owner, and that is the point this article misses.

If someone is, like myself, comfortable with risks, I'm ok with changing neighbors, locations, and I've lived on 3 different continents and 9 cities?

If you're someone who craves stability, then this isn't for you, and you're proably better off buying a house.

Values stability.

You crave an addictive substance. By choosing the word “crave”, it sounds like you are pathologizing the choice to buy a home, perhaps from a need to validate your personal life choice to rent in spite of facing a forced vacation of your residence. Or perhaps you have financial interests in real estate companies that manage apartments.

I think that's somewhat appropriate. I live in Australia where buying a home does seem more of a pathology than a smart economic choice.

Homes are not low-risk or stable at all - you transfer the risk to your job.

If you lose your employment and you have a home, that's a much riskier situation than if you're renting. Because, if you cant find a job in time or in a very small location radius, you must sell.

The mobility of renting lowers the risk associated with extraordinary life events which requires relocation.

If you live in a non-rent-stabilized apartment in a market where annual rent increases are the norm, then by renting you condemn yourself to permanent downward mobility unless your income increases by more than your rent every year.

8-10% annual rent increases are not unusual at all in NYC/LA/SF - maybe you can get a 10% raise every year, but I'd wager even most HN posters can't.

For this reason alone, it makes sense to grind to homeownership as quickly as possible if you live in a top tier market. Those locations also de-risk homeownership a bit since they have the largest job markets and highest real estate demand.

If you live anywhere else in the US then I agree, renting starts to look a lot more attractive.

Not this simple: for early career software engineers, 10% pay raise per year is pretty low. I would expect 20% per year if you move companies.

Can't really move companies easily if you're owning a home, ergo, about 10% potential loss per year over renting, not including the difference in investments you could achieve by having more liquid income w renting vs buying.

Buying DOES make sense. I think it almost never makes sense if you're early in your career. The ceiling is just too high to give up potential earnings that early. The closer you get to the ceiling though, the more sense buying a home makes.

I live in a traditional middle class neighborhood and half the houses are rentals for college kids and people who can't buy. I'm not sure who to agree with here.

> the stability of buying

It depends.

Personally, after witnessing both sides of the coin second-hand, I am not leaning in the direction of either buying or renting in absolute. It is highly dependent on the context and circumstances of a specific situation/market.

I am aware that this is just an anecdote (i.e., it isn't going to say much about the overall state of things across all states in the US), but there is a specific example I'd witnessed myself, which led me to believe that this is a bit more complicated than just "renting is the move" and "buying is the move."

TLDR: one of my former coworkers bought a condo in Queen Anne neighborhood of Seattle (which is a highly desirable and expensive neighborhood in that metro area). Within the first year of his ownership, the pipes behind his laundry machine burst due to no fault of his own (while he was at work), and it ended up flooding the apartment of the neighbor below. It decimated the flooring of both his own unit and the unit of the neighbor below. He ended up was facing the costs of unfucking his own condo AND the unit below.

I don't remember the numbers off the top of my head at all (as the whole thing happened around 2018-2019, and I wasn't really involved in any direct way at all), but I remember that he did the math and (based upon the numbers, reasonably) ended up selling his condo as soon as he'd finished fixing his own unit + paying for the fixes to the unit below.

Meanwhile, I am currently renting, and if the pipes in my unit burst and end up flooding the neighbors below, it would be mostly the problem of the property management company running my building to deal with, not mine. This alone make me feel way more stable than if I'd owned the unit I live in atm.

Buying a condo is half buying and half renting.

A condo somehow combines the worst aspects of buying and renting.

That would be an HOA moreso than the features of a condo, although a condo tends to imply an HOA in the US. The irony of my experiences with an HOA is that its actions tended to suppress my property value rather than preserve or grow it.

I don't know how a condo building could operate without some kind of shared ownership structure for the common areas and shared infrastructure. What are the alternatives to an HOA in a condo building?

actual laws about such things, I presume.

hoas only make sense to me in condo situations - but even then you’re at the mercy of others

As a non american I have no idea what a "condo" is. Is it like an apartment? Or a big house?

Condo means an apartment that you own (vs rent).

Interesting.. I would never think Condo described the financial relation you had with the house but not some intrinsic quality of the house itself.

Technically it doesn’t (as it means condominium which in theory could be single family homes) but practically it almost always means an “apartment you own” though sometimes “half a duplex” or similar proportions of a quad or six plex style.

But in the US it usually implies neighbors above and below and on the sides.

I'm more curious now: what sort of apartment does not have neighbours nearby?

It’s the above and below; most people in the USA will think “condominium tower” when you say condo, but some (rarer) are much more like duplexes or single family homes.

As an approximation, condo fees make explicit a number of recurring costs that are only implicit when you own. E.g. heating/cooling, maintenance, landscaping, accumulating an emergency fund, etc. Thus, if a condo is half-renting, so is buying a house.

My condo owning friend got a special assessment of $40k to replace the siding.

There are A LOT of costs which are not explicit when owning a condo.

Some condo corporations are poorly managed and lack sufficient emergency funds, or proper maintenance, and thus resort to special assessments that are not funded in advance. The same is true of many homeowners.

As a homeowner, that is 100% in your control whereas with a condo it isn’t. I have seen so many times in the local news about condos who are underwater because the board decided to not proactively save and fix things which was a democratic decision made by the board.

Honestly I have such low trust in the ability for humans to plan for the future over the now. It is like a bug in our psychology.

>As a homeowner, that is 100% in your control whereas with a condo it isn’t.

As a homeowner I have definitely had some 5 figure costs over the years that were totally unexpected and several in the low 5 figure range that really needed to be done. Doesn't mean I couldn't cover them in some way shape or form but they happened.

Nothing keeps the condo owner from realizing how underfunded the association is and saving that amount each month for the inevitable emergency.

Most home owners don’t do this either, but it’s pretty much the same thing short of an association leaving stuff so long it ends up being more expensive overall.

Stuff like siding isn’t really all that hard to predict - it typically has a useful life and easy to calculate like a roof. Might get lucky or unlucky but it all averages out in the end over time. If you’re not saving/spending about 2% of your property value each year for maintenance you are almost always running on hopes and prayers.

Granted, the outlier cases a condo owner has far less control over the situation- including neglect to the point of building collapse.

Any good realtor will look into the maintenance history of the building and let you know if a special assessment is likely soon, and any good condo board will be transparent with you about this as well.

If you're renting, getting the landlord to deal with an acute issue is pretty clear cut. They usually get it done. It's the slow burn neglect shit that's almost impossible to get fixed.

Anecdote of my own: The last place we rented before buying had a minor roof leak. Minor, but still a roof leak. The landlord was old, her daughter was responsible for a lot of stuff, and they were both remote for at least part of the year. It took 3 years for them to finally get the roof replaced, evidently about a year after we left.

And these were good landlords. They took care of a bunch of minor disasters in good time: dishwasher, washing machine, thermostats for the baseboard electric heat, stack vent got clobbered by ice coming off the roof? All dealt with promptly. But the roof, important though it was, wasn't a big enough problem to merit quick attention. The place was a log home, and by appearances, hadn't been subjected to any kind of refinishing for a good while too.

> It's the slow burn neglect shit that's almost impossible to get fixed.

There are definitely tons of pros that come from renting from small/individual landlords (e.g., potentially tiny/non-existent monthly rental cost increases over the years; I have an acquaintance who managed to keep the same lease price [which was already extremely low for the neighborhood] for about 3 years now in LES neighborhood of Manhattan).

However, what you described is precisely one of my biggest personal concerns, hence why I tend to stick with larger/property-management-company-run properties+buildings that are, in general, newer. I discovered that it is much easier to get property management companies to get things like that done. In fact, after some of my current neighbors complained enough about elevator outages over the past month (for context: the building is 30 floors tall and has 3 elevators, but we recently had multiple weeks where only one elevator was functional, which led to large elevator lines and slow service), everyone automatically got a $500 credit applied to their next rent payment.

In our condominium building (42 floors) the rule is that every apartment owner is responsible for any damages to their apartment, even if they are caused by an apartment in an upper floor. This is because otherwise the owners of the upper floors would have to have million-dollar insurance premiums to cover the possibility of a leak in their apartment causing damages to multiple floors below. We had an event where a burst pipe in the 28th floor caused damages all the way down to the 8th floor.

This seems like something where it would make sense for the condo to self-insure with mandatory premiums for everyone, so then everyone pays an equal amount for leaks rather than only those who get unlucky.

Yep, owning gives you a lot more control over your living situation. I do think the financial case is really overrated, especially if you get hit with some expensive repairs, but that's not what I like about owning a house. A lot of people, including myself, have had some really nasty scrambles when a lease didn't get renewed like they were expecting and suddenly had to move in a hurry. That can really suck, especially if it happens at a bad time like with a new kid or sick relative.

Owning also lets you invest in your space a lot more, and I'm not really talking about fancy remodels that cost tens of thousands. More like smaller projects like adding a nice catio, buying workout equipment that fits your space, or setting up a nice home office in a dedicated room. My partner and I held off on all sorts of purchases and projects like that while we were renting because each would have been a huge hassle to move, and might not have fit in the next place we lived. The costs are manageable for a long term improvement, but I wouldn't want to toss one out in a year. Now that we own a house we have have gone ahead with a lot of those additions and they make our living situation much more pleasant.

I don’t think renting or buying makes a difference in communities. I had a much better relationship with my neighbors when I rented vs now where I own my own home.

I chalk up the difference to the fact that a lot of people my age couldn’t afford to live where I moved so my neighborhood is full of wealthier older people who I have nothing in common with.

I'd argue it's not undervalued, lots of people are aware of this benefit and that's why so many people want to own their own home despite renting being the better financial option on paper. It's strange the article doesn't mention it though.

It seems like the position in this article pops up frequently among the FIRE crowd... anyone know why this is? It does seem to square with the objective function of maximize financial outcome as much as possible (perhaps ignoring other goals).

Because it's an easy "hot take" to post for people hungry to change their lives?

Arguing the actual optimal approach would require crunching numbers, which would take time by authors and readers, ergo the surfeit of "Here's why you crunching the numbers doesn't matter" popular content.

Also, just to call out one of the many gaps in this particular post: buying a home is a double hedge against inflation.

Given that (1) your debt is denominated in buy-date currency, while your real property value will be inflation-adjusted & (2) in the US at least, buying a home is the easiest way to borrow to invest with, given low mortgage rates (compared to other loans) + <100% down + fixed-rate 30 year mortgages with refinance at buyer's discretion.

Befriending is a weak argument, unless there’s something I am missing. Growing up my family kind of befriended one neighbor, and we just know what they’re up to and who bought and demolished their home.

So like… Is that really that important?

Absolutely agree with this!

We need, as a society, to bring back generational communities.

Our workplaces are not our families!

I'll also add, that once you have children, owning your home is a very welcome level of stability.

Nothing worse than looking for a new rental and potentially being forced to upend all your routines and find new schools for the kids as you cant rent in the same area anymore!

I know three families that owned and had to move cause they could not afford to live in the house they own (gerrimandering- related…)

owning does not shield you from shit like that, maybe in rural america but definitely not in/around the cities

Almost everyone I know has a significant portion of their wealth in home equity. The renters I know tend to have much lower wealth. This is reflected broadly in the US wealth distribution.

You brought up a good point though, and that’s the trap of being house poor. Too many owners fail to look / have not been taught to factor local property taxes and maintenance costs into their homes. My network definitely has people caught unaware by escrow shortages, siding costs, roof costs, HVAC stack costs.

Despite it all, US homeowners seem to edge out renters, but it doesn’t have to be causative, either.

https://www.aspeninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/AS...

It is way better to be house poor than to be a renter, because at least the house is generally an appreciating asset

this is a fantasy people have bought in the last X years because government has done everything imaginable to get people to own homes.

It would help if they didn’t buy a home that required them to sustain the same level of income indefinitely? I certainly didn’t buy the largest I could afford.

> I know three families that owned and had to move cause they could not afford to live in the house they own (gerrimandering- related…)

And this is why, despite some negatives, Prop 13 (California) is so valuable. People don't get priced out of their own homes.

> once you have children, owning your home is a very welcome level of stability

I think this is the biggest factor if it applies. If we want to be utilitarian about it, the benefit to your kids of having the same school to attend, same neighbors to play with, same room to call their own and paint the walls as they desire, etc. just dwarfs everything else. Kids just do well in stable, predictable home environments.

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