cars and mortgages are not cheap , apartments are much more affordable . I ' m going to have to disagree with you there . I moved from a 1300 square house in a suburb to a 750 square foot apartment because I lost my job and had to move to get the new one , and I ' m paying 3 times the amount of rent that I had been paying in mortgage . All told , the apartment is costing me 5 times as much per square foot . Now , part of the reason for that is that I had paid down my mortgage to a fairly low amount , and I ' d been in my home for 22 years . If I moved to a new home every couple of years , the house would cost me a lot more . But , houses don ' t cost more than apartments because houses are eventually paid off apartments have rents that go up every year . Yes , there are condominiums that are like living in an apartment but have ownership like houses , and one can have the best of both worlds there , but . I had land . I had a garden , put up a temporary swimming pool in the summer for a few years , then a trampoline , then built a garden . I built a sailboat on my land , parked a camper there for a while , entertained on my back patio , set up an archery range . I was secure leaving stuff untended on my land in an apartment , everything has to be locked up tight , all the time . While it ' s convenient for me to walk to Jason ' s Deli now , I have to rent a garage , because the apartment doesn ' t have a place to store my motorcycle . There are advantages in living on your own land .