Making housing a commodity - I.e if you buy a house for 300k, you should expect to sell the house for 300k. Many people buy houses with the intent they they appreciate

How do you propose to implement this? In the past, living on the better land meant others would be more likely to try to take it by force. If you attempt to suppress this dynamic entirely instead of transforming it into some other dimension (e.g. violence to money), you will fail and it will be replaced by either a money black market or violence or both.

Also would seem to encourage slumlords - if it's worth what it's worth, why bother with things like "maintenance", "repairs", or god forbid "upgrades"?

They tried to do this in Stockholm, but in the end it completely messed up the apartment market. People end up queing for years, or you buy on the black market for vastly inflated prices.

Demand creates supply, but not necessarily at the price point you want.

The best housing policies work with the market, and use regulation to keep NIMBYs in check, update zoning as necessary and allow builders to build enough m2 to satisfy demand.

You can't wish or legislate away the law of supply and demand for basic needs and physical goods.

E.g., even in North Korea there are black markets where prices go to the equilibrium value.

I think there's a difference between having real estate as an investment, and buying a home to live in.

There's a LOT of people buying up multiple properties and then renting them out.

Often these days they're renting them out on the short-term holiday market like AirBNB and Stayz. Ultimately these rentals are often a net-negative on the neighbourhood community they're in. In small amounts that's fine, but in large concentrations it's an unsustainable burden, and the majority of the benefit goes to those not living in that neighbourhood.

Those that don't do short-term rentals are often putting the least amount of effort/investment into the property. Minimal maintenance, often deferring or only doing the minimum required upgrades in terms of energy/water efficiency makes them unpleasant to live in.

That's aside from the often onerous and arbitrary requirements forced on tenants.

Examples include being forced/"strongly encouraged" into payment methods that add costs to your rent. Being required to hand over all sorts of PII to a huge range of platforms. Then there's third party rent management platforms/companies like RealPage that coordinate rent increases to maximise revenue; not because of any underlying cost increase, but because they can force market prices up.

> What is the alternative to making real estate an investment

Making it a neutral investment by adjusting real estate taxes based on changing value of the land.