Keeping $$$ Residential Employed

[Gahagan 0]

$$$ Sims in all of my cities lately have been having problems finding jobs and staying employed, and their patchy lawns are starting to bother me!  I have tried resolving this issue with a clean run of SC4 and the problem is similar -- the houses continue to dilapidate once my city hits the 'high tech' phase of growth, when expensive offices and high tech industry are in demand.

I have tried supplying all of my Sims with jobs by driving my $$CO, $$$CO, $$CS, $$$CS, and IHT demands as low as they will go (without going negative) but the issue persists.

Has anyone who has had this problem found a way to keep the wealthies employed?

[citiesxlfan42 27]

First off, this happens to everyone. Only 15% MAXIMUM of your city should be R$$$, as they only take up 15% of the job base. First off, they love taking cars, so be sure to keep commute times low.

Second, be sure to have some I-HT. They help. Third, keep them near thier job(going back to commute times.)

Fourth, keep some demand around. If you burn it all away quickly, there will be a huge upset in the job, resident, and size equilibrium.

Fifth and finally, keep lots of R$$ about 55% of the job base is R$$

Hope this helps,

citiesxlfan42

[MattShizzle 11]

Also get the mod recently uploaded by Heibloed that fixes a bug in the game where IHT didn't actually supply any $$$ jobs:

https://www.simtropolis.com/stex/details.cfm?id=22771

[MsProll21 0]

I've read in an article recently (the article was a few years old though) that SC4 is basically impossible to play successfully without using mods. Over the years I've had problems with keeping $$$ sims employed even though I had C$$$, CO$$ & HT jobs available. Commute times were short to medium but still they would abandon my town.

[toroca 160]

The problem that no one seems to understand until they've been around the community for a while is that just because there are Office or High Tech jobs available, they may NOT be for R$$$ sims. Co$$$ is the single-best employer in the game for R$$$ sims, but only 15% of the jobs in a Co$$$ building are for R$$$. That means a skyscraper with 1000 jobs in it is only supplying 150 R$$$ jobs. The remaining 850 are divided among R$ and R$$ sims. In C0$$ and IHT, the ratio is even smaller; only 10% of the jobs are for R$$$ sims.

The best way to limit unemployment among R$$$ sims is to use taxes to limit the percentage of your population that they account for. If you have LOTS of Office and IHT, you may be able to have as many as 25-30% of your population be R$$$ without problems, since in an average city, only half of them are actually in the workforce (and thus needing jobs). I keep my R$$$ taxes high, just to the point where demand goes flat and is neither positive nor negative. If I build up a surplus of jobs, I'll lower it for a while to let more of them move in, but I closely monitor the Jobs and Population graph while I do so. It has been my experience that R$$$ sims will tolerate high taxes so long as you don't actually push their demand into negative territory.

[Gahagan 0]

Thank you for all the suggestions.  I downloaded the I-HT mod and started taxing the heck out of R$$$ to cut back on how eager they are to abandon houses in my city.  Hopefully that will help.