Look, I fully understand why home ownership in this game is restricted:
  1. FFXIV seems to struggle with funky data restrictions, so it's no surprise that housing has limitations, too. And...
  2. If houses weren't in such short supply (let's just say that there were infinite wards, with new plots spawning all the time) then neighborhoods would quickly see huge die-offs as people who unsubbed lost access to their homes (or, worse yet, kept them in perpetuity, with the houses becoming dead, unlived-in shells), but new buyers favored 'fresh' wards where there was more activity (something exactly like this happening in LotRO, and it was absolutely brutal to visit the housing areas to see 1-2 active homes in a neighborhood with 20+ plots).
... I get it - some restrictions are necessary. But what we have right now just cannot be the best balance possible; not with the thousands of fresh arrivals in Eorzea who actually want to dip a toe (or more than just a toe) into the possibilities associated with home-ownership. I realize that the likely release of the Ishgarde wards may momentarily alleviate the mad crush to pick-off an open plot in one of the existing neighborhoods, but at this point it's looking like slapping a band-aid on a missing limb - it isn't going to do much to solve the greater problem.

What's most possibly aggravating is that, as with the restriction on glamours, the housing shortage is something that gets talked about a lot by players, but seems to continuously be as low a priority as can be for the admins. And... that's just not a good thing. Housing is one of those pretty unique (or at least polished and attractive) aspects of FFXIV that we use to talk-up the game to friends and relatives - it's a selling point. But how can it actually be a selling point when it remains essentially unattainable to the bulk of the playerbase?