I did the same math comparing portland with suburb schools (around portland and seattle) and came to the same conclusion. But one other thought is when the money goes to the mortgage, you get to keep the wealth after (assuming you sell to downsize at some point).

>In states where property taxes fund schools, ... b) live in a school zone with high real estate values

Here's some tangential anecdata.

I'm in Oregon, the county I live in pays for the local schools through property taxes. More than half of the tax goes to the schools if I recall.

Anyway, that's not the fun part. The fun part is one of the schools needs(wants?) a new roof. Sounds reasonable, here are the unreasonable parts: They want to raise funds with additional taxes, because they refuse to budget and earmark money for it. They also said they need(want?) several million dollars to do it. The taxes would also be used by the county to buy school-issued bonds from the school to fund the new roof, rather than directly using the tax dollars.

Unsurprisingly, the county measure to introduce that new tax failed during the election in November with a resounding laugh.

The entire way our schools are operated begs some very hard questions.

IME private schools also tend to be in more expensive areas, so you will either still have to pay more for housing, or spend a lot of time and transportation costs to get between home and school. Plus friends from school will live further away.

And of course many people don't have enough money for private school or to move to a good school district.

Yeah, I moved house recently. The #1 factor for picking the house was the good high school 500m away.