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.
Where your narrative falls apart is when you look inside the owner-occupied home and the rental one. They are not identical in any way shape or form. The owner-occupied home has upgrades and luxuries that the rental never even thought about. Better paint, higher quality carpet, nicer windows, better appliances, etc. The list goes on and on. Unless you compare a rental that is a recent foreclosure with an owner-occupied in the same development.
I own rentals. I know what carpet to put in. The better grade is soaked in pet poo within a year, and is useless after two years. So is the cheap grade. Buy the cheap.
In 40 years of home ownership I have never put hole in the wall of a home I owned. Every rental I have has a few fist-sized or larger holes in the wall when the old tenants move out.
Every maintenance item is ignored by renters, even though calling me will get it fixed fast & free. Owners, at least there is chance they have been maintained.
“Most people never really buy a home at all ... they buy a mortgage.”
Most people are idiots. Most are economically illiterate. Something like 50% of credit card holders have debt of $15K or greater on their credit cards. People know nothing about interest and don’t bother to learn.
Go to any web site that amortizes mortgages, and compare the total interest costs on a $120K loan over 10 years, 15 years, 20 years and 30 years. It becomes painfully obvious that a 30 year loan is a bad idea for most circumstances.
Any of those web sites will allow you to see how much you pay down the principle during the first 3 or 5 years of a 30 year loan - virtually none. Yet I’ve talked to many homeowners who don’t know that.
The fact that many people are financially stupid does not make credit cards or home debt bad. I pay my credit card every month and get percentage of reward back on my purchases. For me, a credit card is better than cash. For others, it is pure trouble. It is the person at fault, not the system.
“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.”
Yep. Buy a house with a 15 year mortgage and stay in it 9 years, and it is entirely possible to do very well. Do it a couple of times over your life, and it is entirely possible to pay cash for a house and live in it with only property taxes hanging over your head. But renters pay property taxes too...they just don’t know it because it is part of their rent.
We are all renters...