The words.....Flogging...donkey....a....dead.
Arrange them to get the jist of these threads. (they already said they wont be doing housing anytime soon, like late next year)

I think it would almost be easier if they in some of the bigger cities they added long term inn rental (which is basically what housing is in every other MMO). If you stop paying rent your room is locked until you catch up payments, and you can close your room out when you remove everything. The rooms would be instanced for the renter so a 10 room inn could hold 1000s of players. This would also keep the wilderness open, since player cities wouldn't need to be built.

Given my hero status (I saved King Casimir, don't know if you've heard), I think it's only appropriate that I be given my own room in the Daggerfall castle. Or a suite of rooms. A whole wing would also be acceptable.

I think a short term version of player housing could be instituted pretty readily, very quickly, using systems that already exist in game (no need to generate new mechanisms). I imagine it would work something like this:

• Make it an instanced load that you enter from a chosen city. If I chose to live in Daggerfall then I go to the apartment building there and when I go through the door it loads up my instance. In this version, it would initially be private with no way of having someone else visit my home. (Visitors would require a new mechanism.)
• The load is based on what I buy and costs a monthly fee associated with it (maintenance or rent). Have initially 3 different versions in each of the main styles already existing in each of the areas (1-room, 2-room, 3-room apartments). The floor plans should be existing floor plans based on structures that exist where you chose to live. If I chose to live in Skywatch, I'll only have the Altmer style floor plans available to me.
• Initially, houses should come with bare bones furniture. Make furniture packages available which add player storage in the house. Make the number of packages available to be loaded into each house dependent on the size of the structure. (If you own a 3-room house, you can buy "bed design 1 - room 1" up to maybe a "bed design 3 - room 3", where a 1-room house would only have "- room 1" options.)
• I see the primary use of these to be some place you can log in/out, store extra inventory outside the bank, dress up like you'd like with furniture packages, and display trophies. Initially a trophy case that would display the trophies you get from dungeons, fishing, and now the collectibles could be displayed should be a standard furniture item. At a glance of your trophy cabinet you could see what you were missing. (I imagine something like the bobblehead stand in fallout 3).

If you wanted to add new mechanisms in the game there would be some questions to answer:

• On visitors: How would 2 people who live in the same place (access from the same location to load into the instance) be able to visit each other's home? There would have to be some sort of invite/selection feature for doing this. The visitor's ability to access containers and storage in the owner's home would have to be removed or be grantable. (In SWG, you could set permissions so other people could access the inventory in your home. This allowed for a sub-class of home decorators that spawned out of simply being able to do this, and it was awesome.)
• Guild housing: SWG did this in a wonderful way. You could put houses down all over each planet, and create your own cities based on your guilds. Here you could put guild buildings down (cantinas, guild halls, etc.) and eventually put up your rebel or imperial outposts which became the stuff of PvP guild raids. Something like that would add a whole new content... the ability to do guild PvP raids on different guild structures would be fun.
• Alt sharing: I don't know how this would work for alts in different alliances. Seemingly every alt should be able to have the same house, and maybe you're only allowed 1. If alts of different alliances shared the same house, that would seem kind of odd, but would save the hassle from getting items in a house and having to move it to the bank to swap between characters.

I think one of the biggest incentives and coolest ideas that SWG nailed with houses (arguably the largest MMO that did houses successfully) was the ability to display items. You could manipulate items in space to put them anywhere (make them look like they were hanging on the wall, sitting on a table, etc.). People placed armor together to make them look like mannequins. It was awesome.

But by far, the coolest thing about housing was the event rewards. They often had special events. Participating in special events during specific times would garnish rewards like pictures. Look around in Tamriel... there's a lot of gorgeous art sitting in basements up against the wall. Imagine that art hanging on a wall in your player housing. Imagine that piece of art representing the time when Sheogorath took over Craglorn and turned all the enemies into orange cheeky monkeys with party hats on that breathed fire and lightning. You and your band beat 500 of them and earned his little reward.

Player housing is only a win, win, win in my opinion. There is so much to be done with them.

Nothing beat sitting around in the guild cantina in SWG just hanging out with friends, getting buffs, watching dancers and musicians, only to see the radar blips of a bunch of rebels trying to come destroy our imperial outpost. Having friends come over and check out your awesomely decorated home, sporting all your custom items from events and the like, while you sat on the couch and chatted was just awesome.

Please ZOS, do this immediately.