A syndicated column in this past week’s Sunday Globe asserted that home ownership is always better than renting, even when home prices go down. I won’t go through the logic here, but it rests on the assumption that your goal is lifetime consumption maximization, not, say, saving money for your children to inherit.

Today the Economix column in the NY Times ran the counterargument, “A Word of Advice During a Housing Slump: Rent.” No fooling.

It’s not the same as getting my letter published in the Globe, but Leonhardt did post my comment in his Reader Response column. It read:

Often confused with the financial logic is the cultural belief that homeownership is a civic virtue. I have nothing against a values-based argument for buying a home, as long as it’s logically separated from the financial analysis, but I also think it’s time that we recognized other values as well. Homeownership sparks civic pride, but it also inspires NIMBY responses to necessary public projects and letting undesirables like families (who drive up property taxes) into the neighborhood. What’s more, homeownership spurs profligate spending on remodeling and similar luxuries, which is rarely considered part of the cost. Then again, frugality has lost its appeal as an American virtue, replaced instead by the notion that deficit spending is both the nation’s and the citizen’s patriotic duty.

The Economist stirred up a furor of responses a few weeks ago when it argued that the United States’ incentives for home ownership through the tax code is “daft.” If home ownership were truly so wonderful, I don’t see the need to incentivize it any further, other than to subsidize the mortgage industry.

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