~2004. My highschool civics teacher told the class that real estate was always a good investment because it only went up. I didn't really trust him at the time though.
Real estate can be a good investment, even pre 2008 crash. What can be dangerous is over leveraging. A primary residence isn't really an investment, still worth buying though.
He was just echoing the same sentiment lead to all those house flippers. He was a wealth of conservative BS and that was just one of his thinly veiled prosperity gospel moments.
I mean, if you had money at the time and bought a house in one of the larger cities or their suburbs, you would probably be loaded by now, even though you would regret it for about 5 years after the crash
This "teacher" also would complain about wellfare queens who had children just to claim more benefits, that the best thing that could happen to a country is to be invaded by the US because they'll rebuild afterwards and that every Union but teacher's Unions were obsolete today, among other things.