When you buy a home and take a loan of 90 % to be paid by future wages, you in fact go all in on a single asset with a 10 to 1 leverage. That is risky.
Yup, leverage is always risky. The job market and housing demand seem strongly correlated . Job is lost, so income source dries up and the homeowner is underwater due to falling housing market, leaving them with limited and difficult options. This seems to be the story of the past decade. The really difficult thing is that it's not really a voluntary market, almost everybody demands housing. Renters have to worry about being kicked to the curb by their landlord, which is a considerable risk to me. In my life I was forced to move 3 times from rentals, twice because the owner sold and a third time because the complex was demolished. Hodling a house isn't just an investment for most, it's a place to live and have a family.
And as always, don't forget property taxes
another considerable cost that often increases during economic decline (less business tax income, residential tax raised)
I'm not sure what the winning move is that doesn't require a big starting stack of money.
Owning your house is qualitatively better than renting, because owning gives control, which you need to have a stable life. Because of this, owning should be more expensive, just like buying the majority of shares of a company is more expensive (per share) than just buying a small part. Of course everything is distorted by tax, inflation, interest rate and so on.
What could be possible, is that people buy a house that is rightsized, in stead of maximizing the house in order to save more. Housing is, in addition to being a consumer good, an asset for saving. The most straightforward non risk asset should be money, but as we know, currently fiat money does not have the wealth preservation trait.
Houses attract additional value because of its use in saving. It is tempting to leverage up in times of rise. Sadly, in the long run, over multiple bubbles/crashes, it will only hold its real value.
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