Rental cars, hotel room, and certain machinery/tools? Owning something has costs too, and if you are not interested in learning how to or paying someone else to maintain and secure something, then it can make sense to not buy it also.
I need a vibrating plate compactor once in 10 years, and Home Depot has a stream of customers who need it all the time. I could buy it and rent it to others when I am not using it, but I have other things I want to do with my time. Therefore, it is profitable for Home Depot to rent it to me, and for me to pay a slight premium to never have to worry about it outside the few hours I needed to use it.
Similarly, I have rented apartments in my 20s in places I had no intention of setting down, and buying would have been a waste of time and effort.
Paying taxes on something you own in order to support services provided by a municipality is not the same as renting something you don't own. Not to mention that the cost of property tax on a typical home is much less than the rental of an equivalent home would be.
> if you fall in a coma for a year, you might wake up homeless
No, you would wake up, as scythe has already pointed out, with a tax lien on your property--which you could of course remove by paying the taxes owed.
If you own your home, you can't be evicted from it the way a renter can. The only way to force you out of your home would be to take away your title to it. I'm not aware of any jurisdictions where this is actually done for non-payment of taxes, though.
A much better case can be made that you don't fully own your home if you have a mortgage on it, since the lender has the right to foreclose, which means they take title to the property, if you don't make your mortgage payments for some period of time. (Ironically, your property taxes if you have a mortgage are being paid out of an escrow account, so your mortgage lender will see the consequences of non-payment well before your municipality will.)
It takes years to decades for a tax situation to reach the level of fourclosure on reasons of property tax and if a reasonable issue for health or otherwise the state could even waive it due to non-use.
I'm sure every state is different, but there are places where the state can enforce their tax lein by foreclosing and taking ownership of your property.
A lot of the time this is simply handled by placing a lien on the property due at sale or transfer. Your kids might not be able to inherit it, but inheritance is another question altogether.
> Considering property taxes, do you really ever own your house?
Your basic point is correct. But, consider that a renter is also paying the property tax on behalf of the owner (+ some percentage profit), so you're always better off being the owner instead of paying it for someone else.
Not really and depending on where you live, definitely not. But you have a lot more and very different from rights and responsibilities when you own vs rent.
An indefinite rental sounds like a misnomer better stated as “being too poor to buy <x>”. Or maybe “insufficient supply of <x>”. Which, in this discussion would be land, in certain locations.
Human's are naturally short housing. Owning a home closes the short. We unfortunately don't have a suitable financial product to "own" shelter, but not be bound to a location.
I'm kinda surprised that a suitable contract for permanent fractionated ownership of an abstract housing unit which you can live in doesn't exist. Granted it's a complex set of incentives to balance.
Some tenancies are temporary, and renting can be beneficial in those instances, but most tenancies involve occupants who permanently live in the area and would buy if it were financially feasible.
> most tenancies involve occupants who permanently live in the area and would buy if it were financially feasible.
What exactly do you mean by “if it were financially feasible”? Like yeah, if a mortgage were cheaper than rent, of course renters would do the cheaper thing.
I have no doubt there are plenty of people who rent permanently in an area but would rather own. But "most"?
Half of renters are under 40; according to one analysis, half of renters are young folks just looking for what they can afford in a place they're not sure they want to settle into yet: https://www.naahq.org/who-are-todays-renters
Granted all this is in the US, where homeownership rates hover around 65-66%. I sadly (happily?) don't know anything about the rent/own dynamics in places I have not lived.
By area, I mean a metropolitan area, and I think most residents of a metropolitan area at any given time have no active plan to leave that metropolitan area.
Yes, I understand what you mean, and I am disagreeing with you that “most” (as in > 50%) renters who have no active plan to leave a metro area would rather buy, but don’t because they can’t afford to. Some, sure. But doesn’t seem like it’s “most”.
Moving has extra costs associated with it, but you still build equity. After ~30 years, you don't have to pay a mortgage anymore.
Any money you saved from renting better go straight into your IRA, because you're still going to be paying rent when you retire. 30 years of mortgage is a lot cheaper than 60 years of rent.
Even if you have plenty of money to just buy the apartments and houses you want to live in in Germany, you must pay a tax on the purchase which is effectively a tax that only owner occupiers who move frequently pay, which massively advantages long term landlords over owner occupiers.
Moving every 8 years means paying a lot of taxes if you want to own the property.
