I know the present policy toward personal housing and I can understand the huge mess that player housing makes of the landscape. I do not think having houses and mansions all over is a solution. Neither is suburbs of houses instanced off over some hill outside town. But I have often wondered what keeps developers from adding instanced rooms above all the shops, inns and storefronts in towns and cities.
If they placed a hidden portal/door upstairs in a bunch of building in each town where we could enter a personal room consisting of a chest, table, bed and storage locker would most people make use of that? Do most other people share the desire to have a some kind of home base to work out of? What do you do for a log off place in mmo's (or any rpg for that matter) when you don't have a house?