The puzzling thing about renters, vs. buyers; is that they aren’t in a position to be working the (desperately cynical; but not so readily dismissed as one would like) angle that, if you have enough capital to make the investment, it might be perfectly rational to buy an asset with a serious risk of failure if there’s a correspondingly decent shot that some combination of insurance and public subsidies that everyone will carefully refrain from describing as such will come flowing in if the place does fall over.
I’d like to dismiss that as implausible; but we live in a world where various insurance subsidy structures reward people, year in and year out, for building in parts of California that burn down all the time; or in known flood zones.
