The article does mention this as a special case, though. Owning property is a perfectly good way to store value, because property crashes don't always track market crashes and because property values recover even from heavy declines.

Notably, all the people you're listing got wealthy, then bought property to diversity their investments. It's a very different situation than buying property in hopes of gaining wealth.

Most all of them bought houses leveraged and with inflation and 10-20% down, being paid off by renters, they have millions in property.

My neighbor lives in Europe most the year, just comes back a few times to check on houses. Has 2 homes in Europe too. That money was built by judiciously buying and maintaining the properties over ~4 decades while trying to minimize costs. This was as a self funded real estate agent. Not someone born with money.

There's a healthy mix of people I've known that have built almost all their net worth in real estate. In fact, most my programming friends that bought after the .com bust in SF and the great recession in 2008-2010 have more than doubled their single home investments.

>>Why do drug dealers, foreign nationals, and the ultra wealthy park their money in big city properties? Tangible value.

The real answer: because real estate is an extremely convenient money laundering tool.

What's your threshold for wealthy? I know plenty of younger millionaires (via tech) who don't have real estate other than perhaps REITs.

Depends on the area. Wealthy in SF/LA/NYC is very different than wealthy in KC/OKC/DFW. Mostly it's how far your dollar goes (can you live off your investments alone).