No, it doesn't bother me because it's a self-inflicted problem.
Low interest rates, zoning laws limiting supply, a shift into urban centers. It's really a perfect storm that pushed housing prices up and just encourage people to speculate.
It could have been avoided. More housing could have been built. Government incentives to "get people owning their own homes" could have been better structured to avoid just goosing prices.
People treat houses like investments because, well, they produce returns like investments. If they didn't, people wouldn't look at them that way. You can't blame people for responding to incentives.
The best way to get people to stop buying houses houses as investments is to make them less attractive investments. Everything else will fail. Higher taxes, vacancy taxes, foreigner taxes - it all just encourages fraud, gaming the system, bending the rules. Take a look at Singapore's mess of public housing with built in profits. Every year they roll out some new rule to try and stay on top of it and every year Singaporean's get around the rule because it's just too lucrative not to.
But if you've been around long enough you'll realize it's a problem that will solve itself. Markets correct. People will move where houses are cheaper. Interest rates eventually rise. New houses will get built. New cities will become "desirable" and some old ones won't.
I remember back in 2008 when houses went from "you're a sucker if you don't buy now" to "I'm never owning a house again". It flipped like a light switch when suddenly the gravy train halted. Condo developers in Miami were selling units for $30k and had no buyers.
All this talk of "houses are being treated like a commodity" is just an observation, at a single point of time, at the top of the boom bust cycle. If you take a step back, you realize it's just a blip in time.
It reminds me of the quote from the movie Margin Call: "And it's certainly no different today than its ever been. 1637, 1797, 1819, 37, 57, 84, 1901, 07, 29, 1937, 1974, 1987-Jesus, didn't that fuck up me up good-92, 97, 2000 and whatever we want to call this. It's all just the same thing over and over; we can't help ourselves. And you and I can't control it, or stop it, or even slow it. Or even ever-so-slightly alter it. We just react. And we make a lot money if we get it right. And we get left by the side of the side of the road if we get it wrong. And there have always been and there always will be the same percentage of winners and losers. Happy foxes and sad sacks. Fat cats and starving dogs in this world. Yeah, there may be more of us today than there's ever been. But the percentages-they stay exactly the same."