Addressing the issues with housing

I'm sure most of these have been suggested before, but how about...

1. Stop adding more wards unless an entirely new district is added (ie. Ishgard).
2. Make garden plots accessible without a house.
3. Make company workshops accessible without a house (still FC only).
4. Make all non-housing related items from the estate vendors available from vendors in each city-state.
5. Make all housing related items from the estate vendors available from vendors in each housing district.
6. Add a consumable item that can be purchased with GC seals that will temporarily increase CP for crafting classes below level 60.
7. Either remove the 1 personal / 1 FC house per account restriction or make personal houses shared between all characters on the account without using up tenant slots.
8. Implement a plot trading system where an empty plot can be traded to another character who meets requirements for purchasing housing for any (or no) amount agreed on by each player.

Unless I'm missing something, this will make it so that no one needs a house (and certainly doesn't need it more than anyone else) while allowing it to stay the rare commodity / status symbol that SE and many players seem to want it to be. Anyone who wants a house badly enough can work for the gil to buy it from another player based on their server's economy or try to catch one when it's reclaimed by the demolition timer.

Yes, flipping will be a thing. Flipping has always been a thing and always will be a thing as long as housing remains a limited commodity. At this point instanced housing seems highly unlikely and perpetually devoting more and more server space to it is not a sustainable solution.

This seems to me to be the best way to make the current ward system fair to everyone. Everyone has the option to work to get the gil to buy a house from anyone who is selling one. Not everyone will do what is needed to get one. No one actually needs one at all as it's purely a luxury and no content is gated behind it aside from decorating it.

Or am I just crazy?

All of the above, plus the expanded apartment thing they'll get around to eventually (+ balcony and/or lawn), plus make the first, say, 5 Wards FC-only for that neighborhood feel. Make plots capable of being increased in size. And make it so that upon exiting your apartment, you get to choose which Ward you exit into. Maybe give the apartment lobby an instanced zone so that the residents from all Wards in that region are capable of passing by one another/meeting up. Give it the Chocobo Square treatment where having too many people will spawn a secondary instance.

There. Now we've hit crazy!


Edit: But really, removing the housing lock on things and making apartments more robust would go a long way all by themselves.

While I desperately want housing to be something available to everyone via instanced housing, it's clear that this isn't happening and so making housing into what it was apparently originally intended to be (a status symbol) without any features locked behind it seems to be the only real solution. Expand out apartments a bit and I think we'd be fine.