[munificent]

One to look at rent is that it's like the old joke about prostitution: you don't pay for the sex, you pay for them to leave afterwards.

Rent gives you greater location flexibility and less commitment to a specific place and building. You don't have to maintain it yourself, and you are freed from the mental load of having to do long-term planning around it at all. Not that it's necessarily good for the surrounding community, but to some degree, renting gives you the luxury of "driving it like you stole it" and that's a real value for some people.

I own my house. When plumbers dumped water in the basement and destroyed a floor, that was my problem. Renters pay for that kind of stuff to be someone else's problem.

[airza]

I can see the argument about flexibility, but it doesn't really seem to mesh up with the skyrocketing demand for rental properties in urban areas.

On the other hand, I'm not sure why the service of removing risk from home ownership is good (or why it couldn't be separated into ownership and property management.) In the paradigm you're proposing, the renter wants to be insulated from the risk of property damage or adverse effects on the home they purchased. And the price they're willing to pay for this is... 100% of the equity of the place they live in?

[ecnahc515]

This isn't all that different then how a person chooses to work for a company rather than run a company themselves.

People often dread working for others, but still do it because the risk and difficulties of running a business themselves aren't worth the ability to easily change jobs/roles/location that working for someone else allows.

If you own a house or business, if something goes wrong, you have to fix it, or sell the asset so it's not your problem anymore. If you rent/work for someone else you simply move/work somewhere else.