Since the housing market looks like a crowd of people just signing mortgages as fast as possible just to then turn around and charge that mortgage plus a little bit.
I shouldn’t pay someone’s mortgage like seriously this is just adding an unnecessary problem to the real problem of “living somewhere”
Even if you do pay cash, housing is expensive. Our little house in a not so good part of town costs about $25K a year. About half that is out of pocket and the other half is capital opportunity cost. One reason many people carry mortgages longer then they need to is the capital opportunity cost. My wife and I both rented until about age 45 and to our surprise we were just barely able to do cash at that point so we did.
The other issue at the moment is high interest rates. Mortgages look less good compared to cash. The other issue of course is the high market price of homes as I said previously. That drives both mortgage and capital opportunity cost and is not directly related to true society wide cost, but is more of a financial mumbo jumbo thing.