Renting is bad because it makes you (loosely) short property prices wherever you live, and these often go up. But buying a house exposes you to the other side much more than is probably optimal (especially since your income is positively correlated with local property prices), and has very high transaction costs. A clean and elegant* solution: homeowners could take the short side of swaps on an index of local property values while renters take the long side ("physical" ownership of houses adds complexities). Who's building this?