Housing Demolition Sadness

[Jojoya]

There are a whole lot of commenters completely missing the point of OP's post, and it was just to express frustration at the fact that people hiding inside houses all day doesn't feel as "neighborly" as hanging out on the lawn does, but hanging out on the lawn doesn't credit you as "using" the house to keep it from being demo'd. And I can see their point there.

The "lawn" is always loaded as long as game servers aren't down for maintenance. The house interior isn't because it is instanced.

It's probably easier for the game to register that the specific housing instance was loaded by owner entry so demo timer should be reset than to track that the owner wasn't randomly wandering around a ward but stood on the lawn of a precise ward location that is always there.

Gardening is a niche activity that house owners aren't required to do (and only a small percentage of owners bother with on a regular basis) so it doesn't make sense to use it as the method to reset the demo timer.

As others have pointed out, it only takes a moment to go into a house. Then the owner is free to go back outside and spend the rest of their time AFK on their lawn to get that neighborhood feeling they want.

FC house timers are affected by the members, so more then one person is able to reset it. For personals, only the owner can reset the timer and gets an email; however in game you CAN see the demo timer in the Timers menu if you are a tenant of one (I assume so you can warn the owner).

I don't think the demo timer shows up for a tenant so they can warn the owner. It's there to warn the tenant that the house is about to demo so if they have any personal furnishings in the house they can remove them. Once the house demos, the tenant has no way to get those furnishings back short of being a tenant in another house with the owner of the demo'd house.