Gold is great for people who already have wealth. (Those people also have had other good investment options.) Gold is useless for people trying to earn money to pay for a mortgage for housing today.
Also, houses built today are much more valuable (cheaper per "foot" or "room") than houses built new in 1970-- they are much larger.
not to mention new materials and insulations/energy efficiency, fireproofing etc. All of these things are improvements - it's just "invisible" because people who claim the opposite just don't see it as an improvement (aka, they take it for granted).
It is the same with a lot of other "wealth" increases - it's invisible because that wealth is available to everybody. They only see it as wealth when said wealth is made only available for themselves (or wealth that someone else has that they themselves don't have).
There's an enormous difference between things you "value", and economic value.
We probably value air more than anything else, but it's worthless.
Economic value = demand / supply. Simple.
It can be useful to think of economic value as a more abstract form of energy - a "monetary energy" - with the same conservation-of-energy properties. For example, if I create a TV that's better than all the existing TVs, the economic value of my TV is sucked from all the existing TVs which are suddenly worth less and contain less economic value.
Gold is great for people who already have wealth. (Those people also have had other good investment options.) Gold is useless for people trying to earn money to pay for a mortgage for housing today.
Also, houses built today are much more valuable (cheaper per "foot" or "room") than houses built new in 1970-- they are much larger.