Housing has 3 critical problems, and the astronomically high cost is the least of them.
The real problems with housing is the max 50% price reduction cap, and the discrepancy between servers. The price discrepancy brutally punishes the many new players that populate legacy servers by lumping them in with a rather small group of 1.0 gil hoarders.
How to fix.
- Initial Pricing should be set to the average across all servers.
- The price reduction cap should be removed completely and the amount of reduction per click should be increased from 0.14% to ~2%
What this would do is to make housing eventually affordable for all FCs on all servers. It would also introduce market forces to the housing system which allows players to better determine the value of the housing as opposed to having prices artificially dictated by some internally harvested metrics.
But mostly, it takes something that should be a fun side-activity and allows players to actually engage in it.