One of the major "lessons" of the famous book Rich Dad, Poor Dad was that wise wealthy people view housing as an asset and investment, whereas poor and middle class people merely view it as an expense. This thinking is now deeply ingrained in our culture.
But sure, owning housing that you don't intend to live in (and intend to rent out, or renovate and sell) is an investment.
The problem (at least in the US) is that everyone (of any economic means) seems to think of their primary home as an investment, which is in part why our housing market is so distorted. Everyone believes they're entitled to sell their house for significantly more than they paid for it, which is weird: land may increase in value for a variety of reasons, but houses just get older and crappier over time, and should only drop in value (with some bumps back up for major renovations).
Well, not this exactly. I mean when you rent a property, you're renting it from someone else who owns it. That's what residential property is. So there's really only three broad alternatives here:
1. It's owned by governments at some level. I think we can all agree this would largely be a disaster at any sort of scale;
2. They're owned privately. This could be by individuals or a corporation or a cooperative of some sort; or
3. There is no rental market.
Now as I mentioned in another comment: I do support not having unfettered use of residential property as an investment vehicle but you also need private ownership.
Personally I think a good start would be that the beneficial owner of any property is a resident of that city or state and if they're not, they get charged _much_ higher property tax.
You'll note I said "beneficial owner" there too. You want to hide behind an LLC or corporation to own your property without declaring your ownership? Fine. Pay for that privilege.
Cities should be by and for the residents in them, not hedge funds.
There are a couple of corner cases worth mentioning:
1. Rental buildings (ie not condos) should probably be treated differently than, say, individual units; and
2. I firmly believe that every mobile home park in the country should be able to forcibly purchase the land they're on as a cooperative from the current owner at fair market value. Hedge funds buying up the land mobile homes are on is really a disgusting form of capitalism, preying on some of the most vulnerable.
Not me! I've heard great things about living in Vienna where about 25% of housing is government owned.
Henry George enters the chat:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
There's a reasonable philosophical case that land ownership is a very odd concept, probably wrong at some fundamental level -- people may feel a sense of possessiveness over a place, but most territory isn't a fruit of anyone's labors and attempts to base claims on "improvements" run afoul of the problem that (a) what constitutes and improvement is fairly subjective and (b) really not a matter of the underlying territory claim anyway. And in some sense, having land as property at all is married to the idea of a social order which can assign its disposition, which is close enough to the idea of property itself that it starts to become clear that all property is at some level also government property.
Now, whether it's practical to treat it that way is a different question, but a system where people own and trade in leases that they pay to the state as a tax is also... pretty similar to existing property tax + private leases, it's just that a lot of the private leases would essentially become a public revenue source. And it gets especially interesting if you try to envision an economic system where that's the primary tax.
Personally, I think it could work at least as well as the current system, but the transition might be politically intractable, and it's not a hill I care to die on, so...