Low School grade

[Mike1814 0]

First things first,  it's been awhile, but i would like a apologize for a rude post I made. I never would want to make it seem like I don't appreciate what the site has to offer.

Now to the topic, I'm really trying to sprawl my city, but my residential demand, even with the super demand mod, has really stalled.  It tried saturating the residential areas with parks, schools, trees, and other amenities but it doesn't really work or seem to work temporarily. I've managed to minimize the road pollution, but I still manage to see red spots. I found that the only big problem is the school grade. Most residences are grading them lowly. People said add schools and libraries, but I have WAY TOO MANY (perhaps that is the problem?)!!!! And they are all well funded. Crime isn't really a huge problem, but it's pretty prevalent, but that kills the land value of my areas, but the placement of police stations adjacent to those areas are not really helping. What are some thing s that help improve the school grade or at least be able to sprawl my city again?. Let me add, the age of the city is approaching 300 (it's a shame, it did the cheetah speed too much).

But here are some picture so you can take a look:

[errantry 0]

Do your education buildings (schools, libraries, museums, and maybe colleges) cover all the residential areas? Are you over capacity on those education buildings? Make sure you have enough coverage and capacity to educate everyone. Museums and Colleges covers the entire city. Check the education view of your city. Also, highly educated people are less drawn to crimes, which would help with your education problem.

[BowynAerrow 0]

For one thing all your taxes are set at 'max tax that still allows growth' 9% taxes is pretty much the limit before sims really get their noses bent out of shape.

Try lowering taxes.

I have found that 7% is a good number to aim for, reducing taxes by 0.2% (zero point two, not 2 percent) each time.

Demand and desirability are two different things. Desirability is shown in the map that have green to red coloring and shows the areas where particular demand would be. Demand is based on education, population and happiness of the sims.

If you want to know more about your city, create a 'My Sim' and send him/her on voyages across your city. the thought bubble will let you know what is going on in various areas of your city.

It has been my experience that one can not have too many education and health buildings. I have had cities with what I think are well spaced schools and my sim complains that there is no school close by.

What are your connected cities doing? If you do not have connected cities that may be one of the problems in that you have not the right size population to increase demand for commercial and industry.

And, Ironically, if you do have connected cities then they may have too many commercial and industrial or even residential thus lowering your demands for these in this city.

Have you applied ordinances? These usually give tiny boosts to demands while doing other things like reducing road pollution, increasing education over time, reducing crime, reducing fires, etc.

When it comes to education (higher education) having two colleges on either side of your map appears to educate the older sims better than just one. While one University works for the whole map.

I note you have strips of 'green' in your city, narrow passages that appear to be unzoned, unplopped land with god-mode trees. If this is the case, try laying in grass tiles or other plain parks and planting trees. That may help with local demand for $$ and $$$R - local meaning near the green belt. If there are parks/tree lots there try increasing the amount of parks and plazas by selectively thinning out your city. Remove and unzone plots of land. I have found that in most cities I get the odd one tile wide zone once larger buildings start going in. I remove that single tile wide zone and lay in my own 'pathway' parks, parks I made in the lot editor based off of green park and small plaza that I have made into sidewalks, plazas, flower gardens, blah. Adding visual interest to the city and increasing higher wealth desirability in the very local area.

At this particular point I say you should go into your Regions folder, copy this particular city map and place it in another 'new' folder in your regions folder, Call it your 'Cities copies'.

If you have other regions with large populations, copy a same sized map city to your holding folder. Go into the game and replace that city with the copy of this city. Run the game and see what effect your other region has on this city.

I suspect taxes coupled with a low regional demand is the culprit.

[spaced5 1]

I experienced the same problem in one of my cities that had over a million people.  I had museums, libraries, colleges, elementary schools, and high schools within reach of every residentual structure.  All were well funded and the data map for education was all bright green.  However no matter which residentual structure it was, it always would say the school grade was low.

This city was from my original region, the first city I created which pre-dated the Rush Hour expansion pack. The interesting thing was it was the second incarnation of that city tile.  Before I had the expansion pack installed, the city went into a cycle and every residentual, commercial, and industrial zoned building were abandoned for no reason, and no matter what I had done to the tax rate, it still did not make a difference; they never returned.  I oblivated the city and begun anew with with the city results I described above.

I suspect that the particular tile may have had an underlying data corruption that caused this to happen.  It became impossible to keep stable occupants, and thus I stopped using the region all together and accepted the limits of the game.  Obviously reading your experience this problem is not isolated. The question is, what is the trigger for such events?