An often overlooked aspect of finance is that mortgages are actually a brand of savings, as perverse as that may sound, you have to consider what happens when you pay off a loan over time. The ‘interest’ is the part that pays for the right to use money from the future (which is what credit is, it’s moving money through time) in the here and now, the other part is a ‘capital’ repayment.
When you repay capital you are making a balance sheet gain (or for those into more up to date accounting speak, you make an improvement on your ‘statement of financial position’), even if prices stay static, over time you will eventually owe zero and that means you have a large asset which is the end result of this ‘savings’, albeit not in actual cash.
When you have a housing scarcity and rents are rising, this acts like a ‘tax’ on income, rent and mortgages are paid in after tax income, so the urge to buy when buying is cheaper and obtain a fixed outgoing (as you can …