If you like money, you are better off renting and putting money in a savings account than buying a house and enjoying the appreciation. This is poorly recognized generally but explicitly recognized by people who are serious and conscientious about their money. It is poorly recognized generally due to the persistent bullshit* of real estate agents, who will talk about appreciation, tax benefits, and the value you can add through home improvements.
Appreciation is Geographically Limited
Research has shown that home price appreciation is only substantial if you if you live in a supply constrained coastal metro. Anyplace else, land markets still function and rising prices result in increasing supply*.
Accumulating Equity
The real estate agents who collaborate in the selling/buying of your home will claim a total fee equal to 3% of the total value of the home. On a $250k home, that represents $7,500. Other substantial fees exist. The rule of thumb I learned is that if you sell your home within the first seven years, you lose money--the transaction costs outstrip any value created**.
The Pretend Appreciation of Inflation
A combination of inflation and the effects of compounding. If you buy a house for $250k and sell it for $300k ten years later, it's tempting to think you've made $50k. But in reality, as prices have inflated by 2% a year over those ten years, you've actually lost money. Inflation has been so regular for most of my existence that it's hard to come to terms with the fact that prices have increased by 25% in the past five years. So a house bought for $200k in 2020 ought to be worth $250k, just thanks to inflation, without any actual increase in value.
Tax Benefits
The home mortgage tax exemption no longer exists. Which barely matters, as after the standard deduction was doubled a few years back, it basically only benefitted HENRYs ("Higher Earner, Not Rich Yet").
Home Improvements
The research is pretty clear that most home improvements don't make a statistically significant difference. The only ones that do are revamping your kitchen and adding square feet. Your real estate agent will tell you to paint the house to improve the curb appeal, and that's probably a good idea--your agent will get more calls, and your house will sell faster. But it won't sell for any more money. The buyer knows they can pay for regrouting the tile. Even fixing the roof doesn't necessarily help you--some buyers would rather have a bad roof they can fix in their own time rather than pay a premium for it up front.
As Default Savings
The only serious financial argument that can be made about homeownership is that it requires people to save, by requiring them to invest. There is something to be said for the power of defaults, but the argument is specious. It's only meaningful if: a) you lack the discipline to save, and b) you can afford to keep making those mandatory contributions regardless of shifting conditions. In the case of b), such as for marginal buyers, all its done is load at-risk people with additional risk.
Quality of Life
People serious about money can eventually be argued around to recognizing that they are buying a home for quality-of-life reasons--to obtain things they can't obtain by living in an apartment. But if you buy a luxury car so you can have a nicer quality of life, you recognize you didn't buy the car as an investment. If you buy a house for a nicer quality of life, you didn't buy the house as an investment.
Secondly, the advent of "Build to Rent" (BTR) houses as undermined the logic of this. Nowadays, it is possible to have all the non-financial quality of life perks we often associate with home ownership without actually needing to own a home.
Social Benefits via Selection Bias
Detached homes are often erroneously associated with a wide variety of social indicators, including better school test scores, higher graduation rates, and lower divorce rates. This drives well-meaning but idiotic efforts to improve social metrics by improving home ownership rates. The benefits are entirely a function of a selection effect. If you can afford a house, you've got your act together in other ways, implying both financial stability and wherewithal.
"People Invest In Their Neighborhood"
Quite rare. People will act to defend an investment in their home, in a variety of ways both unethical, and quasi-legal. But actual improvements to the public rare are scarce. The best that can be hoped for is some extraordinary soul will dedicate a decade toward getting an informal trail recognized and paved. Mostly, it's that a class of folks with spare time and a college degree will show up at a public meeting and NIMBY anything that might lower property values.
Sweat Equity
Buying the worst house in a good neighborhood was once a viable strategy. But one of the offspring of the Great Recession was an industry of 'flippers', devoted to buying, rehabbing and re-selling houses, with access to cheap capital and professional labor.
In Conclusion
Comparing renting to owning is hard, because it's an apples-to-oranges comparison. Either type of tenure is a bundle of perks and problems, among them: size, location, private access, private open space, legal privileges, legal liabilities. Both apartments and houses offer things you can't get without pre-selecting for a housing type. But deciding the financial case for home ownership is much simpler: there isn't one.
Others have written most of this more eloquently and more extensively.
A Caveat: Getting Lucky
Buying a house in an 'up-and-coming' neighborhood, as previously unsafe / polluted / run-down neighborhoods transition is an astonishingly good way to make money. There exists an entire class of developers focused on this strategy (which requires money and political capital and time and patience). Catching and riding such a wave of transition can be enormously lucrative.
But planning a property purchase to match public or investments in infrastructure or policing (or land use-transition away from noxious industrial or nuisance users) isn't feasible for an investor for whom their investment is also their shelter.
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* In the technical sense, where bullshit is a statement which is made without any effort to ascertain the truthfulness of the statement. On Bullshit - Wikipedia
** During the Great Recession, I had the unpleasant experience of explaining to a single mother who had bought a house (in a then-marginal neighborhood), and that the two years she'd owned her house had built her almost no equity, and that there had been no appreciation at all.