Mortgage is the way to go if you can have enough income to qualify for it and have the down payment.
This is simply not true in the general case, and stating something simplistic like this is a disservice to people's financial literacy. The highest variable in this accounting isn't even market dynamics, it's the investment habits of the counterfactual renter.
There are situations in which buying is more appropriate than renting, due to personal circumstances and specific market conditions of where a person wants to live. But it's not at all a clearcut decision without those specific conditions.
I agree in that scenario it would make sense to rent…but only for a time…eventually you have to retire and don’t want to be paying rent that has increased year over year. I.e. here rent can go up 3-4% y over year.
No, it's not "only for a time". Mortgage is leverage at a low rate, so as soon as it's done, the cost of ownership for the home makes ownership worser in comparison to renting. The reason this isn't obvious is that you're not doing the comparison to the counterfactual renter investing the downpayment amount plus the cashflow surplus during the entire lifecycle of the mortgage.
