The Real Problem with Housing

[YuzuyuVolanti]

I think what continues to elude me about the housing issues as a whole is the lack of willingness to change ward layouts, expand wards, or add different types of ward. And I'm not meaning like "FC only" vs "Personal only".

If they see a huge variety of people want medium/large houses (both personal and FC), why not create wards where there's more of these, and less smalls? Expand the currents wards to add more space for these plots, etc.

I'm positive it would be time consuming, of course, because it means reworking a map, possibly in it's entirety, but it would go at least some ways to helping.

All the housing districts we've seen follow the same approximate (or exact?) plot distributions, even if the positions are different. 'X' smalls, 'y' mediums, 'z' larges. IF they continue with the ward-based housing, I feel like it would be more diverse and real if there were different layouts and plot allocations in different areas, then each ward wouldn't necessarily feel cookie-cutter and more people can feasibly get the house they want. It won't, obviously, fix the entire issue. I'm not sure they ever can without instanced housing.

It feels weird to me for them to see how high demand specific plots are, but continue to insist on over-peppering wards with smalls people now avoid bidding on if they can help it (since they no longer need to even bother with that as a first step to bigger homes). If they added more mediums and larges, they would get more substantial gil sinks for people, because the house itself is one, not to mention the potential buying of items (e.g. vendor permits and vendor housing items, the 400k+ item to place your home, etc) for these houses. In turn, they would also get more diverse neighbourhoods and more people into homes they actually want.

Edit: Also thinking this over, it sometimes seems like smalls are basically pointless to continue producing. I don't hate them, mind, and I know some like the smaller size, but it feels like the lotto system rendered them almost obsolete, because you no longer need to get a house to try to transfer to your desired size/area. It feels at this point like we might as well just have M/L. Maybe that's a silly thought, but it's here now.