I concur. I take a Battlestar Galactica inspired approach to appliances in my house. It's fine if they have computers in them, I just don't want them to be able to communicate.
There are dorms at my university (University of Maryland) that are over 100 years old, but have been renovated enough that it's fine. I would hope that Universities have a long enough time horizon that things would be built to last an extremely long time with regular renovations.
With catastrophic climate change on the horizon, the theory is that pandemics will become significantly more frequent.
The solutions are political not technical. Housing needs to be something that isn't used primarily to make money. Cooperatives, Vienna-style PPPs, and a society where if your house price doesn't constantly increase you can afford to retire.
The best reason for housing prices increasing faster than inflation is that the western world has made it policy that middle-class wealth is based on housing prices rising faster than inflation so many economic actors will personally benefit from higher and higher housing prices.