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The thing that really makes home owndership a good investment is inflation.

That said, I owned my own home for 18 years in Seattle before it was ripped from me in a divorce in 1997. I rented for ten years and during all that time except the first year lived in much better homes than the one I had owned.

And to give the rental game during the housing price runup some perspective: The home I rented for several years cost me $1,600 a month. If I had purchased it on a standard 30 year loan, even with the very low rates at the time, my monthly payment, including real estate taxes, would have been ~$3,450. And when the bust came I would have been almost $200,000 in the hole.

I told people in the later 2000’s that it was a severel dangerous proposition to own a home. That being said, I DID buy a place in 2008, two weeks before the election. But it is not the kind of place you would want to rent. As the author says, it is where you LIVE. And property that you own gives you certain utility. In our case, it was the ~32 acres in this slide show of our property in central KY. I consider it to be the best investment I ever made. Period.

http://s409.photobucket.com/user/robbbb4/slideshow/Kentucky%20home