So many wards are dead because people are buying and leaving their house after or before they decorate it. In theory the ward system makes it easy to find Friends with your neighbors.
We did that, created a linkshell and a Discord for our activities. We even farmed together, because our ward is a FC ward and has potential more players.

But the reality is, the flux of players can be seen even in this ward, so most of the time there are just 2 people in the entire Ward online. All player wards are worse where it is a miracle to see another player, yet a neighbor.

Having a place to meet and socialize doesnt fit with everyone should have their own house in a ward. And if you are searching for cool housing deco or void homes with riddles or clubs, you will use other means of searching for them, which are just better.

Instanced housing is the way to go for the future. I would greatly give up on my personal house if I had to chance for an instanced house similar or better than my house.

This system could also take away lots of gil. It could go like this:

First you buy an appartment. Now you can upgrade it with gil. Having a small exterior for 1 million (like a small voidgarden in a middle of desert/forest/island/snowycliffs), where you have a small garden, where you can place down gardenitems (we really do have too many) and a small view. After that you can upgrade the interior and exterior for more gil. The more money you invest, the bigger it gets.

If you use the same models like for housing you would have hardly any work to do as a dev.

Or/and, like mentioned before, we could buy instanced houses like in TESO or similar MMOs. We saw with island sanctuary, that if you strip away 30 decorated small gardens from different players, you could easily allow more than 90 decorations per player, when they are alone.