“I look at it as the house is now paying me $1K a month in rent avoidance.....”
As an aside, during the last Clinton administration, there were serious major policy discussions on making such ‘rent avoidance’ taxable income. The idea was that they would determine the fair market value of what it would cost you to rent your home. Then, they would deduct your mortgage payments leaving the ‘imputable income of rent avoidance’. This amount would be added to your real income to determine your Adjusted Income for tax purposes. All in the name of making the tax code fairer (and increasing revenue too).
There were stories about this circulating at the time, but I don't think what you've described here was the case at all.
I believe the so-called "rent avoidance" aspect of the 1993 Clinton budget only applied to the taxability of Social Security benefits for senior citizens. If a senior citizen owned a home outright, the plan was to have their "rent equivalent" added to their taxable income to determine if their Social Security benefits would be subject to Federal income taxes (I believe any Social Security benefits paid to retirees with incomes over something like $85,000 are taxed as income).