Oh, lord.
I belong to a couple of real estate forums and the "rent versus buy" threads go on
forever. 
Pro-renters tend to use the "you could have made more in stocks" idea. Meanwhile, as we said at the top of this thread, most average people do NOT make more in stocks. They buy too high, sell too low, and their average return is very puny.
Pro-buyers tend to stick with the "in time, buying will be cheaper than renting". But I recently checked the value of the first house we bought 20+ years ago for $67K, and it's now worth $100K. If we had been paying a mortgage (at those rates) all this time, we would be into it for about $120K. Plus repairs.
So. . .
The sucker part of home ownership is the total of 30 years of mortgage costs (usually 2.5-3 times the original purchase price), holding on when the "fashion" of a particular house style or neighborhood fades, and choosing properties with high upkeep.
The sucker part of renting is there is no hope of any type of return, your neighbors are transient, and rental rates tend to only go up.
Point is, there are tradeoffs with both.
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