customers? how do i increase them

[DrwHem 0]

I have a fairly large city of about 60000 people now and i have it generally segmented between residential areas and commercial areas near the avenus and a large section of it by the waterfront area. every business i seem to click on says it has low customers. how do i increase this?

also on a different topic i have been stuck at 60000 people for awhile now. i get some small spikes in industry and commercial demand but none in residential. i have 4 neighbor connections and at least 14 parks since i got the minor league stadium. how do i spur this growth? all my neighbors are highly concentrated on inustrial plots and have little or no residential areas.

[Shoji_sim 9]

One way to fix the low customer problem is to make sure commercial lots are facing a road with high volume (data views). It takes a while to raise it.

As for the population problem, try playing with taxes, place resedential-attractive buildings, etc. Parks will not [usually] increase resedential demand, only desirablity and land values.

[mayor_brando 8]

I find that commercial areas near residential zones have more customers. Also, large commercial areas don't get as many customers, at least in my experience. But traffic also helps.

With the population problem, I think that reward buildings bring up residential demand, and you could try zoning for more jobs; that might bring up demand.

[DreamSong 0]

Customers is directly related to Traffic Noise. Traffic Noise decreases desirability for Residential, but does the opposite for Commercial. Placing Commercial next to busy highways and avenues will greatly increase customers.

[MTA3479 0]

You need more parks. I had about 50 parks for a city that size. One park for every 1000 sims is a good rule to follow

[ArchangelMichael 51]

Actually, the recreational items that provide residential cap relief are plazas.  Large plazas, are best, of course.  This will help.

Place the plazas near commercial areas to increase local commercial desirability while providing city-wide residential cap relief; then place the parks, playgrounds, flower gardens, etc. near residential areas to increase local residential desirability and provide a little more cap relief.  Residents also like trees, low pollution, and high mayor ratings.  Try doing some UDI missions to increase local mayor ratings, but save the city before you accept a mission.  The reason for this is that failed missions result in decreased mayor ratings -- in which case you exit without saving and try again.  The positive effects of a successful mission are transient.  So are the local effects of parks, plazas, etc. (but the city-wide cap relief remains until it is satisfied).  Local effects will diminish about 25% per month, and will not remain if you immediately save and exit the city, then re-enter.

[BlackDragonAJ89 21]

Really, you need to just experiment around with commercial zones a bit to see how they work. For me, I've found it's best to have them either scattered around at the end of your residential areas or to have them placed between residential areas and industrial areas, since most sims start off working in factories anyway, and the traffic flow that occurs between the zones will help the commercial zones grow better. If you're playing out cities spread across regions, try placing some commercial zones at the edge of maps along your highways and avenues that exit through into the regions (well, that's all that I usually have exiting out of my city are highways, avenues, and rail systems, but this works with plain roads as well).

A good thing to help boost the population is to have a neighborhood with it's parks, schools, and hospitals in one section all together, although there are many methods to this and how it can be done... So I'm not much help here. =/

[Shlarin 0]

I have countless CO $$ and CO $$$ skyscrapers (about Pop 2,000,000) on a large tile and most of them show "Low" Customers.. it seems these skyscrapers develop anyways even without many customers or that this data's effectively irrelevant.

[duack 14]

Another reason you might not be getting many residents is because there may not be enough commercial and industrial jobs for them. I usually make sure that there are enough jobs for two-thirds of sims. So your city of 60,000 should have about 40,000 jobs in total.

[errantry 0]

Check jobs, then desirability/land value. Use Equinox's RCI Query Mod or the Census Mod to get a better grasp of city demand/caps. I was stuck with medium density in high density lots not developing. Once residential demand became high again and I put in parks (probably 1 per 5000 people), they grow pretty fast.