It's the land under the house that appreciates in value.
If you want to reduce that land value appreciation, here are two good ideas:
Land value taxes help to discourage the hogging of land while encouraging construction, which in turn dampens the price of land.
Removing restrictive zoning polices means that the demand for land is decreased, thus dampening the price of the land.
You can't compare a house and a car in terms of value.
Both require maintenance and both can decay to unusable if left abandoned too long. That much is similar.
But maintaining a car beyond the point where parts are available becomes very expensive since everything becomes a custom job. There are few 100 year old cars running around and those which exist are a labor of love, but from an economic perspective makes no sense. It would be far cheaper to just buy a new car.
This never happens with housing. You can maintain a house indefinitely, through many generations and it never becomes cheaper to buy a whole new house. (Barring some disaster to it, natural or human-induced, of course.)
So a house can't become a depreciating asset. A roof over your head will always have value (that's why this whole discussion exists, everyone agrees there is value to a home) and since that house will last essentially forever, it can't possibly become worthless.
Most people would prefer a regular house or apartment, given the option.