The Real Problem with Housing

[Corvus_V]

Or do you want a vibrant game full of happy players and community?

The way you're going, you're not heading for the second one. More houses, personal AND FC, is how you're going to enrich the social culture of your game. Especially if you want to slim down human interaction through huge chunks of the game to basically naught.

People shouldn't have to deal with artifical scarcity and a broken housing lottery system. Most people will not be happy with it. The only way to realistically fix that is to redesign housing so either:
1. People don't have to be cramped into smalls, with dog crap item limits and no space (meaning it would have to be instanced)
2.

that's it, really. There simply aren't enough large and medium houses for the people who want them. Without instanced housing, which would solve the issue of not having access to a company workshop/gardening (both of which are basically non-issues, given are current circumstances; anyone who tells you otherwise is lying to make FC housing look dire when it isnt) if all they do is keep the current layout and add wards, you would have wards full of empty small plots and a bunch of eaten up medium and large ones.

There's no reason homesteads can't be visitable either. If you're even worried about community just give people who own homes an easily referable ID akin to a phone number.
Hell, if someone comes to your house and starts trolling you you could probably have functionality to ban them from the exterior. There's just way more reason to do it than to not.