Reading the context of the message, it seems that they're not stating that housing would be completely removed, but merely the residential areas taken offline for an extended period while they resolve the issues as a worse case scenario (if the issues with the lottery could not be fixed in a normal maintenance window).

Given Yoshi's previous comments (the last just two days ago) there is nothing to suggest that SE will completely remove housing from the game as a last resort. So don't worry about it too much.