[majormajor]

For me, those calculators tell me I'm better off buying if I'm gonna stay for at least 5-7 years. Which is... not a terribly long amount of time, honestly. If I'd made the buying decision 5 years ago, I would've actually been much better off by then, because my rent went up way more than predicted. So of course there's a lot of uncertainty there. Maybe purchase prices will crash soon. Or maybe we hit a new normal and individual homes or spacious townhomes never come back down in price, due to shifts in demand.

My rent means that there are tens of thousands of dollars a year that I'll never be able to invest in anything. So even if I had a better investment option than taking a 5x (or more!) leverage multiplier on a downpayment, it would still have to overcome a pretty big disadvantage right there to come out ahead in the long run.