Any time I go to a large city im exhausted by being charged for doing anything. How do people have fun if theyre poor(the neat part, you dont, probably). And to make it worse many of them probably have a 1 bedroom apartment so its not like you can sit in there all day long (at least i cant).
I realize im still spending money by being in my house out of town, but still, at least things I buy are owned by me, and im not paying someone else every time I want to do anything. If I want to stay at home all day I have tons of stuff to occupy my mind without going nuts.
I figure 98% of lemmy users live in big cities so id like to hear this perspective!
Oh, I’m still under the thumb of a mortgage… For now.
I’m working on it, but hopefully by retirement I’ll be able to say I outright own my home.
Sorry about the confusion. In my haste to make a point I’ve probably said some things less clearly than I should.
My main motivator for thinking that there’s less home ownership in cities than in less urban areas, is because of density. Between basement rentals and full single-family dwellings being converted to multi family rentals, plus the inclusion of purpose built high-rise apartment buildings, you end up with a lot of families ending up in rental property. Yes, there’s still a lot of homes that are owned, whether a single family house or a condo or something else, there’s a lot of it, but bluntly, you can’t Cram as many people into a single family home compared to how many get crammed into rental properties.
Most rental homes I know of are 2-3 families of 2 or more, so at least 4 people. While plenty of home owners are a married couple and Maybe a kid or two. At best they’re on par, at worst there’s 3 or 4 times as many people per house.
Home owners are simply existing in lower densities.
If I walk down a street in a medium sized town and ask the people on a street if they own or rent, it might come out as 50/50 for how many houses are bought or rented. Given that rentals tend to have higher occupancy, you end up with more families renting than owning, and that’s before you account for apartments and condos.
From my experience apartment buildings are far more common than condos, and generally have smaller units in larger buildings, so there’s simply more people per sq ft, and all of those are renting.
I don’t have hard numbers on any of this, it’s entirely my opinion based on anecdotal evidence at best, but I would estimate that there’s a nontrivial difference in numbers between who might be renting and who is buying/owning.
I definitely could be wrong.