It's impossible to treat housing as an investment when so much is being built every year. There's no scarcity. In Japan, and probably also China, houses are depreciating assets.
There is tremendous housing scarcity where housing is scarce and in demand, such as with transit access to major metro areas.
The depreciating housing is in places people don't want to live. In general modern societies are centralizing in cities to a degree never before seen, but that migration is stymied by catastrophic amounts of NIMBYism and regulation holding back density.
In Tokyo most properties don't depreciate that much if at all, and modern Japanese building code means new structures are much more permanent and last longer. It takes time for the culture to shift as with all things, but the Tokyo metro won't stay contrarian to every other metro for long - its been trending away from the always-deprecating building for over 30 years now.
Plenty of people in China treat housing as an investment. There is an over-supply of investment and development, leading to an abundance of units and affordable rental rates.
Preventing people from profiting by supplying the market (aka treating the good in question as an investment) leads to shortages and high prices, as the history of rent control amply demonstrates. Anecdotally, San Francisco has had some of the most stringent rent control laws in the US over the last 50 years and today has the highest rental rates in the world.
A construction boom is great, but temporary. Best way to ensure housing isn't treated as an investment or speculative commodity is to have a tax on land value.
Unfortunately, this view is very unpopular in the US, particularly among the most powerful special interests and voting blocs.
People are going to treat housing as an investment so long as government institutions artificially constrain it to such a preposterous degree that you can exploit unmet demand in perpetuity.
Even in China precincts with more recognized property rights will see this effect where even on massive government works projects contractors just build around holdouts whom can exploit the growing demand for the land they are on.
China treats it like an investment. In fact it's probably typical Chinese speculation (that is the creation of fantastic bubbles) driving the construction of these large buildings.
