Housing is a system in the game that you can make people not be able to access by buying up more plots than you need. This wouldn't be an issue at all if housing wasn't drastically limited, but here we are. It's jerk move to have lots of plots when people could use them.
And you completely avoided the real point in your competitive spirit thing. This shit don't matter, dawg, and if someone's kept interested by having the best house or the richest on the server they're just looking for motivation, desperately. Very little of this game is designed competitively, everyone even has their own gathering nodes.