Housing feature: Ward Construction

An NPC would collect necessary items like crystals or whatever random crap you think needs to be sunk from the economy. Each item would be worth some number of "construction points" depending on its value, and when enough total points have been contributed, the new ward is built. For an arbitrary example, this could start at 1,000,000 for the first constructed ward, and increase by 3% for each subsequent ward.
(If, somehow, this runs up against actual server limitations, the NPC could say something like "well we're ready to construct and just waiting on the permits" until the server limitation was handled and the new ward could exist.)

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To encourage contributions, it would be possible to pre-purchase plots in unbuilt wards, and whenever a new ward was built, preordered plots would first be awarded to whichever player had contributed the most points since placing their preorder. A pre-purchase would remain in place, and all your contributions would count toward it, until you actually receive your plot, no matter how many wards have to be built in the meantime.
Pre-purchasing plots would mostly follow the same rules as buying plots after they exist, except that unbuilt plots would never devalue, and switching your pre-purchase to a different plot would refund/contribute 100% of the purchase price instead of 30%.

This would allow players to feel "special and elite" for getting their house quickly, without having to completely deny housing to the vast majority of the playerbase. (Compare: world-first raids.)