Owning a house doesn’t mean you have money, if you inherit a house and the mortgage is paid the base payments are smaller than most apartments. You need to look at the state the house is in, if the person doesn’t have the money necessary to maintain basic things like changing a broken water heater or fixing their leaky roof then you know these people are pretty poor, they just got lucky once and ended up with a house that they maybe should have sold while it was in good shape…