Once you account for maintenance items owning becomes decently more expensive than a simple “mortgage + utilities + insurance + taxes” calculation shows. A $10k furnace every 25 years adds something like $40 a month and that’s only one of the many wear items there are.
There are other non-tangible benefits to ownership, of course.
Right, but remember that if you are a renter, the landlord is passing those $40 to you bundled in the rent (along with all other future maintenance projections). There's no free ride, the renter is paying for all of it plus profit margin to the landlord.
You can sometimes get lucky as a renter by finding a small-time incompetent landlord who doesn't price these future maintanence costs into the rent, but that's not the norm.
If an investment house was a business, it often takes a decade to see substantial returns, sometimes after many years of hard slog and even losses. Would you accept that from the businesses that hacker news dreams of?
I think the fundamental issue is that the whole renting market is buying long and selling short (buy a dwelling for a long period, rent it for short periods) and that causes issues on one or another direction (either you rent for what appears "too much" because you need to build reserves, or you rent for what appears "fair" and the first major expense kills the landlord).