Your personal preferences are influenced by culture, but they include your material realities. If you're making decisions about your finances/housing without considering your material reality, you've been meme'd into a decision. A lot of people have been influenced into believing that being an owner is always better than being a renter, so they make stupid decisions.
Im not going to argue against the idea that stupid decisions are stupid or that some people make them.
My point is rather that preferences, including the material reality that you seek, are almost entirely cultural. There is no culture vs reality, but rather some cultural values vs other cultural values
