Rent vs Buy

So in my grand search for a place to live, I came across a 12坪 (430 sqft) place in a pretty new building and a decent near-downtown location, except they didn't interior design it the way that place was.

Rent is expensive in Taipei: the apartment rents for $22,000 TWD ($700 US)! For that price, you could make your own mortgage payments for your own apartment! There's another apartment in that building, also 12坪 and quite well-designed with lots of storage and closet space: selling for $5M TWD ($160K USD).

That's the general pattern I'm seeing now: I should be buying a condo instead of trying to rent. And yet, I'm not in the market to buy a place. If I were more willing to take risks, I'd just buy one, and hope it increases in value during the time I'm here. (In Taipei, real estate in decent areas just keeps rising and rising.) But

(1) I don't have enough for a down,
(2) I don't have the credit rating yet in Taiwan, and
(3) if I bought a place, I'd have to wait for it to be re-designed before I could inhabit, and where would I live in the meantime?

For now, I just have to bite the bullet and continue to pay someone else's mortgage for them, to put equity in their net worth instead of in mine.