> I don't think home ownership is an "every single weekend" thing unless you bought a fixer-upper.

It really isn't, and I don't know why so many homeowners act like it is.

I bought my house in 2015. It was built in 1983.

The only things I've had to do are a roof replacement, HVAC upgrade, and deal with a broken water main.

Sure, none of those were cheap, but that's 3 events in 11 years, and the first two I expect to not have to do again for at least 15 years, and the water main was a random one-off thing, and it didn't flood the house. It put a lot of water into my crawl space, but it didn't become a problem.

People who swear by renting will use it as evidence to show that owning is more expensive than renting, but I think they just ignore that those costs are factored into the rent, not to mention the fact that once I noticed my roof had a problem, I had people out the NEXT DAY to give quotes on replacing it. When I replaced the HVAC (Old A/C compressor was frequently tripping the breaker and was underpowered), I was able to choose to upgrade rather than dealing with a landlord who would install the cheapest thing they could find.

But ah...I've digressed.

The point was that home ownership isn't nearly the maintenance burden some owners seem to claim it is, and when there is a problem, being the one in charge of getting it solved, rather than having to harass a landlord into solving it, is nice.

The incentives change when you become a homeowner. You reap the benefit of any improvements you do to the property; you also know for sure when you're going to leave it, and you have the freedom to do whatever you want to do to it. Before, when you were renting, any improvements you did were throwaway time and money, benefitting the landlord and future tenants more than yourself.

Many homeowners respond to these incentives by doing more improvements.

This is also why many governments (both local and federal) subsidize homeownership. It incentivizes residents to improve their properties rather than let them rot, which has positive externalities for many of the surrounding properties.

More to the point, some people just want to be constantly changing/improving things and a subset of those folks need to acknowledge that this is a choice not necessity.