One difficulty of lower-the-rent politics is that if you actually succeed in lowering rents, the news will report it as a bad thing.
Georgism is based on land taxes to avoid this distortionary motive.
If you rent, then sure.
Housing as an abstract investment that perpetually and magically gains resale value with no material change in what its underlying real property is a modern fiction and is essentially just the result of a prolonged speculative bubble becoming culturally normalized.
So yes, housing is a large investment for people, and very often their largest, but in a functioning and sustainable market, that investment is not valued by gross appreciation in resale value (the topic of discussion) but in ongoing dividends and value delivery.
The GP is right to be skeptical.
The underlying value increase is mostly from land value, not the actual house itself, which should depreciate. Increasing land value should be a good thing because it means the surrounding area is improving or becoming more productive.
But if it's uncaptured (especially by restricting construction in the neighborhood) it causes value increases which only benefits the current homeowners, and then only if they're lucky.
I know of numerous people that bought precisely because of expected gains.
I’ve also personally observed these ‘prolonged speculative bubbles’ occur 4 different times in the United States alone in the last 30 years, and know the same has occurred in China, several well populated area of Canada, India, Singapore, and Japan as well.
If it’s so common, what is your point exactly? Because you seem to be denying a very large and very obvious part of the actual market reality.
It doesn’t always go up and to the right of course, and I’ve seen numerous folks be ruined too.
(Which news headlines call "multifamily oversupply".)