That may have been historically true, but that's also because people have historically not relied on much better investment vehicles.

Historically, housing has actually been a poor investment relative to investing in the stock market. Most people simply didn't know how or whether to invest, but nowadays investment vehicles like index funds and target date funds make that relatively straightforward.

We should be discouraging housing as investment so affordable housing can be a thing that exists and the housing market can respond to demand by building out the supply at levels people can afford while also encouraging people to sock away at least 5-15% of every paycheck into passively managed investment vehicles that have way higher long term returns than housing ever did.

The current situation is that we subsidize the middle and upper classes in terms of housing at the expense of the poor and those just starting out by artificially and unnecessarily pushing up the price of housing and constraining supply.