Wards.
Wards.
The better analogy would be if they made your old house obsolete (to the point where you willingly discarded it because it was useless) and forced you to get a new house.
The closest thing I could imagine to that would be some sort of steep "house repair" that used your item level as a multiplier on how quickly your house lost durability, so you had to build/rebuild a new, "higher iLVL" house each patch.
^ This.
The only legitimate complaints about this are people who quit due to RL circumstances, but I feel like those people who will be losing their houses are most likely the minority in this equation. The large majority is going to be people who bought houses, now take up limited space, and have become disenchanted with the game and hoard their real estate.
I feel as if many of the complaints about losing the house at all are from people who regularly make vitriolic posts describing why the game is so very very awful but they most likely don't actually sub anymore... which I'll never understand. Why hang around to keep tabs on/talk trash about a game you don't like? If you're really done with the game you'll be just fine losing your house, because well, at that point you most likely don't give a shit. You'd only care if you were holding on to the future hope of returning but want to unsub in the mean time. As someone who has never let my sub lapse since 2.0 launched, I would hope that people who take regular breaks and give less money to the company wouldn't have priority over me on a limited resource such as housing. That seems rather silly to just hold on to it for the sake of doing so.