It's not the author taking a stock-centric view; it's the author pushing back against the conventional wisdom of the value of property investment. As Shiller d

It's not the author taking a stock-centric view; it's the author pushing back against the conventional wisdom of the value of property investment. As Shiller demonstrates and you even agree to, home prices track inflation over the long term. Further, Shiller -- in Irrational Exuberance -- shows that this is largely because of the money some owners reinvest in keeping their homes modern, so this isn't even a passive tracking of inflation, on average. The arguments about finite land mass, etc, have been said for decades and I suspect one of two things is true: (1) It's wrong: Manhattan continues to build vertically and while it has a high average rent, the median and lower quantiles are actually much lower than on the West Coast, for example. (2) It's already priced by the market. Finally, stocks also perform very well in high-inflation environments, so this isn't unique to property. The one difference is that most people have 5-to-1 leverage on their homes, so they enjoy outsized gains, but this is a risk as much as a benefit.