To Buy or Rent.

Interesting piece on the NYT: Is it better to Buy or Rent?

The above link takes you to a Buy/Rent calculator. Here you can plug in all the parameters appropriate to you and your region. Given that most major markets are seeing horrendous real estate conditions I would encourage you to relax (tone down) assumptions on price appreciation, and if your a good tenant then lets assume YOY rental increases are small at best. Scroll over the graph to see your results.

Feel free to play around with all the different parameters to get a gauge of all the results possible.