In one situation you are paying someone else for a place to live, and when you stop doing that after 30 years, you’re out on the street.
In the other situation you are paying someone else for a place to live, and when you stop doing that after 30 years, you have a house.
After 30 years you either have a house or enough cash to buy that house. In many cases, the rate of return on the cash is sufficiently greater that it is significantly more than the value of that house.
I have decades of data on this in a few locales (including Bay Area and Seattle) based on my own experience and despite buying and (still) owning homes several times. It never pays out better than renting and investing. The math doesn't math. I still buy places occasionally but I am honest about this reality.
For the kinds of places I rent the finance math is so heavily tilted toward renting that it is a no-brainer. I'm not alone in this; I know many people of means that choose to rent even though they could buy any house they wanted.