I'm with you. Granted, I do consider it an investment in the sense that every month I pay off part of the principal and thus I can get some money back when I sell it whereas I'd get nothing if I was renting but I don't expect greater than inflation appreciation on the house.
However, this could just be because I grew up in Chicago where there is endless farmland that can be developed and thus expecting greater than inflation appreciation on your house is foolish as someone else can just develop some farmland and sell it for the cost of building the house thus forever increasing the supply at the marginal cost of building a house.
> but I don't expect greater than inflation appreciation on the house.
Even expecting the house to hold its value is rather strange. You would naturally expect the value of a home to decrease by some amount each year. Most of us would prefer a modern home to an older home. The only reason it does not is because supply of new homes is restricted.
In well functioning markets like Tokyo, that's exactly what we see: homes tend to lose value each year until around 25-30 years most are simply torn down and re-built.
So in Tokyo, not only is the average rent sharply lower than a city like San Francisco, the housing is also more modern. The average age of a home in Tokyo is 20 years. More than half of Tokyo's housing stock has been built since the year 2000.
In San Francisco, more than half of the housing stock was built before 1940.
"You would naturally expect the value of a home to decrease by some amount each year."
If you deduct maintenance from your home value, it more-or-less does. I don't see why a maintained home "should" decrease in value, though. A lot of the value of a home is in the structure, which tends to wear much more gracefully than, say, a car's body.
There is little that maintenance can do to prevent a 100 year old foundation from 'settling' in a pretty precarious way. Or finding out one day that the water pipe is a 100 year old wooden pipe that is now rotted through. As a house gets older, maintenance ($) turns into renovation ($$) then critical overhaul ($$$), even in the houses with good bones.
I'd expect the value of a properly built and maintained house to decrease very slowly (e.g. the building I live in is ~110 years old and not that much worse than when it was built), and while that's still a negative, on the other hand the value of the land would appreciate even (and especially if) there's active building of new homes, so the total value of house+land can be quite stable even if supply is not restricted. It won't skyrocket, though.
Wasn't a big issue for us at least as we have double decker commutator trains. The one that ran through my town has 3 tracks even so the train only has to stop at a few stations and then it hops onto the middle track and drives the rest of the way downtown. Only took 30 minutes to go 20 miles downtown and going out further doesn't add much time as your just adding distance traveled at top speed.
> better town
Not sure what metric you are interested in that regard but if it is school wise, I went to one of the highest rated public schools and you could still find smaller more affordable homes in the school district. While there were plenty of wealthy people, I had some friends whose parents were firefighters and USPS delivery men.
However, this could just be because I grew up in Chicago where there is endless farmland that can be developed and thus expecting greater than inflation appreciation on your house is foolish as someone else can just develop some farmland and sell it for the cost of building the house thus forever increasing the supply at the marginal cost of building a house.