To me, all the recent advocates for "renting & owning cost similar amounts" that I've seen have no decent counterargument for building equity, which is the single greatest benefit of owning vs. renting. This article hand-waves it away with "you 'throw away' some other money on top of your mortgage, at least at first," but how is this relevant? No one's saying that ownership = zero money "thrown away," or that ownership always means a lower monthly payment.

In the long run, these two factors tend towards irrelevance, relative to the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of wealth you build that you couldn't have built through rent payments.