I went from paying about $1200/month renting a two bedroom house (not a ton of apartments near me, the ones that are here are pretty shitty) to around $900/month for a 15 year mortgage (was renting as a student, graduated and got a job and had the stable income lenders want to see before they'll give you a mortgage, plus I knew I wouldn't be moving away). Granted, the house was a fixer upper and I've already put around $10k in repairs into it over the past 8 years, but the value has also gone up by about $30k during that same period. I started making extra payments and I'll have it paid off in about 3 years (at which point my biggest expense if I decide not to work would be health insurance, but I could maybe think about scaling back working which would be amazing).

If what you're trying to do is just spend as little as possible at this moment, or if your credit is shot or you don't have stable income then yes, renting is better. But the reason people say you're throwing money away is that, in comparison to owning, you really are.

Home ownership is a viable way to get out of a cycle of poverty. My parents went from a shitty trailer, to a fixer-upper house, to a sort of average middle class house, to a really nice house all with their income growth after that fixer-upper barely beating inflation. If what you're looking for is a way to spend as little as possible (after taking into account selling and whatnot) long-term, ownership still generally wins (which, again, is why rentals even exist in the first place - somebody is able to make more money charging rent than they spend by owning the place they're renting out).

Obviously it's a risk. Real estate assholes try to pretend it's risk free but they're assholes. It's not a sure thing that you'll always get more than you paid for a house. And it definitely anchors you to an area so if you think you'll need to be able to move relatively easily it's a bad idea. But it is a sure thing that you'll get nothing (compared to owning - yeah you get a place to live but we're not comparing to being renting to homelessness we're comparing renting to owning) from renting.