Use other investment vehicles for growing capital.
If you rent, and are unlucky, you might find yourself priced out of the market for the type of properties you would like to live in, and at the same time become priced out of purchasing.
Where I live, purchase prices and rents have increased 30% or so in the 8 years since I bought, while my repayments are the same. My repayment + interest has been substantially below rental prices since a few months after I bought.
If it had gone the other way, yes it would have been a bad investment, but it would have been a cost I'd still be ok with because of the predictability it gives (and if prices dropped, I'd use it as an opportunity to trade up, still hedging against prices increasing again).
Essentially by purchasing I have locked in an upper limit on the vast majority of my housing costs for the duration I stay in this house, and also reduced the risk of a substantial jump if/when I move, as the value of my current house is likely to move reasonably close to the overall market.
That hedge is worth a lot to me.
Your potential downside is not the difference between a lower rent and the cost of a home. Your potential downside is the entire cost of your home.
This is actually one of Shiller's points about rent vs ownership (mobility).
One thing Europe has that is good is a lot of public housing, even for middle-class people (like typical renting programmers)-- not just US-style "projects". This is great because it keeps the price down on the private market as well. You still need to build enough to avoid scarcity, of course. Otherwise, you end up with hellish queues.
I'm a US citizen with ambitions to one day move to Europe (I'm a DevOps/Sysadmin/Operations guy); how does public housing in Europe work?