The latest, via the Galactic News service, is that abandoned SWG housing is to be condemned as of thiscoming June.

If You Don’t Use It, You May Lose It!

Notice to citizens with inactive accounts since April 17, 2006: The following House/Structure Pack Up Program will commence June 5, 2007.

House/Structure Pack-Up Program

If your account has been inactive since April 17, 2006, any of the following structures on your account will be CONDEMNED, marked as abandoned and demolished beginning June 5, 2007: Houses, Harvesters, Factories, Player Associations.

Demolition Procedure

Starting on June 5, 2007, those structures that have not been reclaimed will be marked as abandoned. An abandoned structure will then be subject to demolition by your fellow citizens. Citizens will be rewarded for each structure demolished.

Demolition Rewards

Junior Wrecking Crew Worker Badge – Destroy 10 abandoned structures.
Wrecking Crew Manager Extraordinaire – Destroy 100 abandoned structures.

For each successful destruction of an abandoned structure, you will recieve one reward point. Reward points are redeemable at the Luck Despot for cool in-game items that you can use to decorate your own structures.

Reward Items (one point apiece):

Imperial Painting
Rebel Painting
INS-444 Holo-Pet Droid
CLE-004 Holo-Pet Droid
Xeno Couch
Xeno Recliner
Xeno Table
Xeno Desk
Xeno Desk Lamp
Xeno Rug

Find Out if Your Structures Are Condemned

If your account has been inactive since April 17,2006 and you left with your accunt in good standing, we have re-activated your account with up to 14 consecutive days of free access. This free access is available between April 17, 2007 and May 17, 2007. To take advantage of this free access period, your account must have been inactive from at least April 17, 2006.

Save Your Inactive Structure and Regain Your Veteran Status

Reactivate your account prior to May 31st, 2007 at 11:59 pm PDT.
Recieve an in-game painting featuring Obi-Wan Kenobi (one per account) as our “welcome back gift” for re-activating your account.

For more information about the SWG Pack-Up Program, check out the SWG Forums or the Pack-Up FAQ.

So a couple things spring to mind:

1. Making an event out of deleting expired-account structures is a very good idea. If they could apply that kind of lateral thinking to other new content in the game, that’d be something to talk about.
2. I’m gonna get me some Xeno furniture!
3. The obvious reason to do this is to clear out the worlds a bit in anticipation of a server merge. Player housing is (I imagine) one of the stickiest wickets to tackle when it comes to considering bringing SWG player together. Do you just back everyone’s stuff up and start fresh? Do you try to keep everything in the same place? What about structures that overlap? Who has precedence? There’s a cap to the number of player cities on a given planet; how do you decide which cities stay and which are deleted?

I really hope this is the prelude to a merge, however they do it. I’ve been wanting an excuse to jump back in for a few months, and having people to play with again would be a really great reason to do it.

update: I hopped on to poke around a bit and (sigh) didn’t see a single person. As usual. What I did see was that houses are already labeled with the (Abandoned) flag, so you can know for certain whether your house is slated for demolition. I took a walk around my neighborhood outside of Theed to get a sense of how much damage I’ll be able to do in a few months, and I stopped counting after fifty or so. Assuming I move quickly on the first day the event starts running, I should be able to catch that 100-buildings-destroyed badge no problem.