The player housing or whatever it's called is one of the most stupid ideas WoW community came up with.
It seriously serves no purpose other than RP, while it would take a lot of resources to actually make it work. Remember Garrisons? Now imagine Blizzard trying to implement Garrisons all across the Azeroth for every player. Evn if they were just a small part of it, like 1/5, it'd still require a lot of work just for simple "house".
If you want to RP, then join a random RP server or just do realm-hops with the LFG tool and do the RP there - on dead servers, or in the places where are currently no players.
I don't care that other games have it also, it doesn't matter. It's like saying there should be the same things or rules in each sport. WoW isn't another MMO, it's just WoW. We have the main hubs/cities. Stormwind was so dead in the previous expansions it's just sad.
Afterall it's WoW, not Sims.