With regards to the possible upcoming housing relinquishments. . . . .

[SQBoard]

Point is you do meet your neighbors and things do randomly happen like FC's just raiding other peoples houses and hang out, heck I've met a bunch of DA2 friends because they had their house in the same ward as the FC I was in!

Visiting or "raiding" other houses can happen in an instanced design, people just have to click a menu. Sort of like someone in Ward 1 visiting their neighbor in Ward 2 in this game.

Running into your neighbors on the same zone is nice, but if my experience is any indication, it doesn't happen often enough with a significant enough result to justifiy effectively locking out the majority of the playerbase for the uncommon or even rare occurrence of any significant neighborly interaction. I don't mean just seeing 1 or a few people running by once in a while, i mean something useful...eventhough seeing people at all is also rare here in my experience.

Also, even if a massive uptick in community happens in the wards, the number of those groups/individuals is a minority compared to everyone who wants a house for legitimate use...even if they wipe every house and start over.

This is all academic, but if a significant increase in community is SE's intent for using this neighborhood set up, then that housing vision has severely failed on my server...even back when all houses were active and not owned by the same player. It's not unheard of for developers misjudging their playerbase, it actually happens often. Although it's rare to see devs of a game to publicly admit it until long after the game has shutdown.

I'll try checking other servers' peak times to see if it's any different...maybe the japanese servers?