ChubbyFIRE without owning a home?

Is anyone doing ChubbyFIRE without owning their primary residence, or planning to?

We rent in a VHCOL area (NYC) where the rent vs buy math doesn’t make sense for us. Eventually we may move out of the city and buy somewhere… but there’s a very real version of the empty nest life we envision where we don’t move away. That’s 16ish years out so nothing firmly in our sights yet.

I see lots of people mention that part of feeling ready to RE is either having their mortgage paid off or having a low rate locked in so not paying off strategically, etc. But planning for housing costs to wind down significantly over a hopefully long retirement.

Right now I’m thinking that the timing of when we might plan to buy something is after our son (potentially) goes to college, but that’s also fairly shortly after the time we would target to RE which feels risky. But it also feels risky to plan to rent well into our 70s and hopefully 80s, right?

Anyone not a homeowner here? How are you thinking about this with a ChubbyFIRE?