[ToucanLoucan]

> Who’s talking about rent here? The article is about mortgages.

I brought up rent. While the long term consequences of paying rent and mortgages are quite different (equity, credit, assets, etc.) ultimately both are equal in that you are exchanging a pre-arranged amount of money on a schedule for a place to live.

Both are also equal in that failure to maintain such a schedule results in houselessness, one notably faster than the other.

> When you buy a house you know what you’re getting into.

A dubious assumption. Tons of people caught up in the 2008 housing crash were sold loans they couldn’t afford by financial professionals who knew damn well they could not afford it. Notably none of those families were made whole, and the banks who facilitated the crash were, because they effectively were wearing economic C4 vests and standing in the center of Wall Street, ready to blow the entire thing to bits.

> Sorry, I don’t subscribe to the pessimistic “landlords bad, capitalism bad” viewpoint of the world, not that this has anything to do with that anyway.

Yet you brought it up.