Owning a home is hardly a con game. I moved around in the military, but I lost $2K on one home and made $40K on another. Buy using a 15 year mortgage, and the interest costs are not bad at all.
Fools who buy using 30 year mortgages and who then move every 3-4 years are suckers, but home ownership is not. It is a financial decision, and buyers need to consider how likely they are to stay put, the cost of homes in the area vs the wages, etc.
If I had to sell right now, I’d probably make less than I put in (and I own my home outright). But if I sold now, it would be to move to a smaller house on more land farther from the city, so I’d be paying a lot less. In essence, money gives me the ability to swap homes and pocket the difference in values.
However, this house is building up a lot of memories of kids and grandkids, so we might stay. Those memories can disappear quickly when you rent - but then, there are fewer stable families today, too.
The mortgage itself is the heart of the problem. Most people never really buy a home at all ... they buy a mortgage. And there's nothing wrong with that, if they look at it as a purely financial decision and separate it from the idea of "home ownership."
In most metro areas people who "own" a home pay a steep premium to do it. There's an easy way to see how much of a premium they're paying just by doing a little research. Find a typical home that is up for sale in any given town and calculate the costs of "owning" it with no money down -- including insurance, repairs, etc. Then contact a realtor in that same town and see what an identical home would cost as a rental. There is usually an enormous difference between the two numbers, which tells me that the person who decides to "own" the home is getting shafted on that deal.
I’d also point out that for many of the reasons you mentioned, home ownership is likely to end up limited to two types of people: those who are independently wealthy (and therefore don’t have the same anxieties about paying their housing costs as the rest of us), and those who are government employees (because they’re the last group of workers who are unlikely to get laid off and rarely get transferred to a place that would require them to sell the home).
That's exactly what I did. And when interest rates fell, I refinanced and used the $600 a month savings to pay down the principal. After less than nine years I was able to sell my house and walk away with enough cash to buy a retirement house in Arizona for cash. Now I'm retired with no debt and a six figure income for life. Some con game!
My reasoning may be faulty (I’m sure someone will jump in to tell me so!), but I pay a mortgage because I will need the equity in the house when it is paid off to help me in old age (house won’t be paid off until I’m 80). At that advanced age, I can either sell the house and put the money in the bank to live on for how many years I have left, or I can take out a home equity loan. Odds are, though, I won’t need to do either because I’ll have a bit more than a $1,000 taken out of my debt queue when the house is paid off...that, in itself, is a big financial plus. That’s my reasoning for owning...otherwise, as a single woman, I’d rent. (But then again, rental prices keep going up, don’t they? My mortgage does not).