There are no smalls left on any high-population servers. Personal housing is a mess, basically, someone at S-E thinks solo players can actually afford a medium+.
Houses are not just "RP". They can be furnished with crafting bonus stations, high-profit gardens, and chocobo stables, as well as various other more minor QoL additions. They can also be installed with aetherytes that are exceedingly cheap to teleport to, over halving the cost of accessing their QoL resources as opposed to going to a city for them.
They are centralized bases of economic power within the game.
