Own-ward Bound?

Four years ago, Michael Choe appeared in the pages of this magazine for doing something spectacular: choosing to be a renter. At a time when real estate riches were Topic A ("Home $weet Home," read the TIME cover line), the engineer, from Sacramento, Calif., decided to sell his house and move with his wife and baby boy into a rental. "Compared to owning, rent is cheap," he said back then.

Exceedingly smart move. Since the summer of 2005, house prices in Sacramento have plummeted by half. Choe and his family — which now includes a second son — watched from the sidelines until the end of last year. That's when the Choes moved back into a home of their own, a four-bedroom they plucked out of foreclosure at a 35% discount from what it had sold for two years earlier. (See pictures of Americans in their homes.)

Is this smart move No. 2? In other words: Is it really time to buy?

As the housing bubble inflated, the math increasingly favored renting. House prices went up and up while rents stayed relatively flat, meaning you could get a lot more bang for your buck by choosing a lease over a deed. Now, with the housing market in a pulp, the tables are turning. Choe's most recent rental cost him $1,500 a month. His new mortgage payment, for a same-size house, is $1,570 (after a 20% down payment). "Not a bad deal," he says — especially considering that once Choe takes into account the money he saves on taxes by deducting his mortgage interest, his new payment is actually a couple of hundred bucks a month less.

Sure, it's easy to toss around reasons it's always better to be a homeowner (that mortgage-interest deduction) or it's always better to be a renter (no property taxes, and who wants to fix his own garbage disposal?). The more complicated truth is that at certain times it makes more sense to be one or the other. (See high-end homes that won't sell.)

To figure out which is better now, start with the fact that in the long run, the costs of owning and renting stay in fairly steady proportion. Economists call this the price-to-rent ratio — take the average cost of buying a house and divide it by what you'd pay in rent in a year. The analysis shop Economy.com calculates that since 1986, the price-to-rent ratio for U.S. cities has averaged 16.5. In other words, the price of a house is the same as what you'd pay to rent it over 16.5 years.

In late 2001, this ratio began to climb, and by 2003, it was soaring along with home prices, hitting 24.7 in 2005. In those days, you could get 24.7 years in a rental for the cost of a house. That was right about when Choe decided that renting looked like a steal.

But since the end of 2005, the price-to-rent ratio has been falling, thanks to the home-price implosion. Across major U.S. cities, the ratio is back to 17.4, practically its historical average. (If you wrap in rural areas, the figure is smaller and the trend less pronounced but still there.) "A year ago, it was a better deal to rent," says Andres Carbacho-Burgos, an economist at Economy.com "Now you have a significant number of areas, especially those hit the hardest by the correction, where, when you compare prices to rents, you'd be led to believe it's a good time to buy."

A significant number — but not everywhere. At TIME's request, Economy.com ran the numbers for 54 metro areas and compared their current price-to-rent ratios to what their ratios have been over the past 15 years. The result: in 21 cities, renting still looks to be the better bargain. Among the renter-friendly outposts are Baltimore; Raleigh and Charlotte, N.C.; Salt Lake City; San Antonio; Trenton, N.J.; Philadelphia; Honolulu; Seattle; and Portland, Ore.

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