The Housing problem and my proposed solution

[Snugglebutt]

Even if you kick all of the inactives houses, that makes what.... houses for like 10% of the population without a house? What about the rest, fuck them, right?

10%? Total number of plots in this game equates to less than 1% of the playerbase, if just opening up inactive houses that's a tiny fraction of that already low 1%. On the topic of how active neighborhoods are I tend to see around 1-3 players from time to time that are from other FC's near our FC house which is not much. There is usually a few from our FC around there too, one of which is normally me and I might be seeing more present than most players at their homes do because ours is right next to the marketboard and summon bell.

Instanced housing + voluntary linking of homes to create neighborhoods... it's been done before.

This idea I like a lot, you get town personal house of various sizes with land and you also get to pick and choose who your neighbors are which creates your own neighborhood instead of being stuck next to inactive and dead/unused houses or bad neighbors. Not sure how the linking would work though in practice.