Are people "speculating" when they pursue higher education? People, overwhelmingly, are not purchasing houses to make a profit, but rather using the perception of endless appreciation as a misguided justification for taking on increasingly absurd levels of debt. And that is the core problem that needs to be solved. You can try to change perceptions, or you can change the ability to take on unreasonably high levels of debt. Same with higher education.
As for LVT, you can't expect me to go read a book to appreciate your argument. And I'm vastly more inclined to read than average. Owing to that I did at least check out the Wiki on the book. The excerpts section [1] seems to offer an argument that is either false or highly outdated. Any look at San Francisco, NYC, and other places will clearly show that the areas with the highest level of economic development also offer the highest wages, by an overwhelmingly wide margin.
What drives the prices up is not some conniving and far-sighted bourgeois, but rather economic development driving defacto unlimited levels of demand. In a place like San Francisco you can earn $70k for labor that would pay $30k in a less developed area. Because of this you will never have affordable housing, because that $40k delta would otherwise drive everybody over to hoover it up. This is the scenario literally everywhere in the world.
When you look at what few exceptions there are, they tend to not be exceptions. For instance Tokyo is often cited, yet it seems most people still have an obsolete image of Japain in their minds. They've gone through a 30 year period of stagflation, have a shrinking population, and a declining economy. So housing seems cheap in Tokyo by Western standards, but it's extremely expensive by Japanese standards which is where the overwhelming majority of the demand, and thus the price equilibrium, comes from.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress_and_Poverty#Excerpts