I am a private housing owner in FFXIV. Like I assume many others would agree, I feel compelled to keep paying subscription fees, even during periods where I am not interested in playing, simply to keep my house. I assume that this is intentionally designed this way to keep me paying my subscription. It is simultaneously unfair to those who are looking for a housing plot.

If you allow your subscription (and thus your housing) to lapse, all of your belongings are sent to the resident caretaker and will be destroyed after 35 days. This system also holds us captive. Even if you decide you want to lose your housing plot, you need to log in within 35 days of demolition to retain your items. So nobody who wants to take a break is going to intentionally go this route.

I'm no game developer, but my opinion of an extremely customer-friendly way of doing this would be if, when your housing is auto-demolished, your entire estate's items and configuration are stored indefinitely, to be placed in a new location in the future when you decide you want housing again (perhaps only within the same district; I don't know the technicalities). If in the future you choose to relocate to a plot of the same size, you are not charged gil. Similarly, or perhaps as a result, using the standard relocation system should probably not be so prohibitively expensive, but that's a topic for another thread.

This is more of a message to the developers than a topic meant for community discussion, but we're not really given a way to provide direct feedback to the developers, so here it is to discuss if it interests you.