The narratives about housing needs are very cultural and I have to admit I didn't even realize this until recently (creeping towards middle age!).
I grew up in post-communist Eastern Europe where home ownership was the absolute norm, renting was a thing maybe if you're a problem person that can't even hold on to something as simple and basic as ownership of an apartment. These people were frequently "protected tenants", i.e. tenants who couldn't really be evicted usually from government owned property (and well, a post-communist government owned a lot of stuff that a "normal" government wouldn't, but this is not really the key element to my story anyway, plus this same system exists in Sweden so you can obviously do it also without the whole totalitarian part) and "private" tenants were virtually unheard of. It existed literally only as a concept for very problematic people and for college students who for some reason didn't qualify for student housing and whose parents were too poor to afford to finance a purchase of a small apartment. But anyone who was poor who didn't fail a year in college would in fact qualify for student housing so even there private renting was a bit of an extreme solution. Of course, in a place like this, you can imagine who the private landlords are and how the whole thing works. You DON'T WANT TO find yourself renting in a place like that.
My parents were absolutely not rich in any way, they were maybe slightly above average having had university degrees, but to them too buying housing for their college going kids was the most self-explanatory thing in the universe. So they bought me a basement apartment that was generally crappy but well, it was mine. In retrospect, I am really happy this was normalized to me in this way because I very strongly believe that everything about European societies and economies is made in a way that makes renting a TERRIBLE idea, unless you can have a protected rental in a place like Scandinavia.
But anyway, I have three kids and consider it a given that I will need to be able to buy three small apartments in whatever university towns they head off to (and obviously I am already making it clear to them that fairness will be applied to this rule, so when choosing where they want to study, they might wanna check housing prices as while we WILL make sure to house them in a secure and sustainable way through ownership, choosing Paris might mean a 17m2 closet while the sibling who goes off to a smaller university town in Sweden might be looking at a house with a yard.
But anyway, I digress a little, the reason I started this rant was to illustrate that I come from a background where people would always choose to own the simplest, cheapest place they could ever get over renting whatever mansion at whatever attractive price, because the need to create a long term safe housing solution is the first most central pillar of how we plan our finances. And this makes it possible for people to live with their 200-300€ pensions without half the amount of whining I hear here in Western Europe.
Meanwhile, I feel I am meeting more and more people who GENUINELY can't even grasp this world view and who think that wanting to buy housing for our kids makes us "privileged" (even if we are converting a 2 bedroom apartment to a 4 bedroom to be able to keep our finances healthy enough to be able to do this without also having to compromise on where my kids get to grow up (we live in the most privileged area on this planet, the wealthiest suburb in the wealthiest country in the world, by accident (really, we got an Airbnb here and never left, because, following the logic I grew up in, we just immediately bought the place that was for sale right next to it, something that paid off spectacularly as soon thereafter an epic real estate bubble was inflated here, which sadly meant we couldn't easily upgrade, but at this point my kids have friends here and their school is exactly how you would imagine a school in an area like this, so where would we go?). I mean sure as hell I am privileged from the POV of 99% of humanity, but from the point of view of all these local Karens I am actually referring to, oh hell no.
