There is a bug where sometimes the game doesn't register that you have entered your house unless you interact with something inside of it. It's something that has been getting reported for a while and been viewed with skepticism by part of the player base but it does exist. I had my own experience with it earlier this year.

A friend has one of my alts as tenant in his house. I had noticed the demo notice in her timers and let him know.

"But I was just in my house yesterday".

He went back in his house again. We both still had the demolition notice in our timers.

He logged off his character, logged back in, went into his house and this time interacted with his Summoning Bell as I suggested. Finally the demolition message cleared.

All I can say is that it's best to make sure you enter your house every time you log in and interact with something in the house, and also to check your Estate timers on a regular basis (I tend to check my timers every Monday to make sure I got all my weekly stuff done on my characters and it's easy to check Estate at the same time). The notification will show up in timers 14 days before demolition while the emails don't get sent out until 10 days before demolition.

As for the something better for housing, they need to stop pouring resources into the ward system and start expanding on the instanced system. There is no need for demolition with instanced housing (why apartments don't demo). The ward system has created far too many headaches with no real benefit (doesn't feel like I'm living in a neighborhood when I never see my neighbors).