Too much not enough?

[The Good King 3]

  I could not find a section for city building questions specifically, as most of the topics sections here are quite specific. So, I apologize if there's a better place for this post. Now, to the point:

 I used to be an avid SC4 Player until my hard drive crashed a few months ago. I've just recently got back into the city building spirit, but it seems I'm extremely rusty on my SimCity mayoral skills. When I first got good at the game, I know there was a tutorial I followed like a sim bible, but I can't seem to find it anymore. I've recently tried to revive an old beloved city of mine, Vault, which is the neighboring city to a large metropolitan, Orin. Fortunately, Orin was backed up on another PC, so I was able to start Vault off just like the old one.

 The city specializes in having more total jobs than population, being a very high-end business center for only taking up a single corner of its own map space. I used a strict discipline while building this city: extreme patience. I never expanded into a new map area until the old one was near perfection or at least making good income, and I never did end up filling the map more than halfway before it was lost. Anyways, while rebuilding this city I ran into a problem I never faced in the old vault: unemployment. It started in only the infant stages of my city with 4,000 population, and yet with that I had 8,000 total commercial and industrial jobs being filled.

 So, I upped the education pool and raised the quality of life to inspire more demand. I then created even more commerce and industry in an area just north of the main residence. For a moment people were satisfied, but then, in a whole different area of the city, buildings which had been perfectly fine throughout were suddenly jobless. These buildings are literally surrounded by commerce, high industry, and manufacturing, and are primarily dense medium/high wealth buildings. It seems that every time I create a bigger job pool, it fills up instantly and leaves another pool of medium and high wealth citizens without work. It sounds like total nonsense, having double your population in jobs, and an unemployment problem. I never had this problem with the old Vault either.

 I believe it to be an equilibrium problem concerning my neighbor, Orin. Orin, which now holds about 65,000 residents and only 35,000 total jobs, used to be in total equilibrium with my city business-wise, back when my city had a population of 40,000 and a job pool 70,000+. Now however, I've barely made it to 8,000 population, and it sounds to me like Orin is draining my job pool. (They're my only neighbor.)

 Anyhow, I've posted here because I'm not sure what to do. I don't have enough population for a huge mass-transit system to see if reducing commute time will help. (Tried it, and it completely tanked my city funds while not even improving the situation.) My buildings are becoming stressed thanks to unemployment, and it's completely stunting the growth of my city which isn't even old enough to have a convention center. I realize I write way too big of posts, too btw.

[Raceman95 2]

First, welcome! It seems that you should create a new nieghbor, planned well and connected with subways and bus(use parking decks at city border). This new city will be all commercial and this will open up new jobs. plan for expansion, by making a highway beltway that is 10-20 tiles away from the edge of the new job center. NO RESIDENTAL IN THIS CITY. a pic of the region will help me decide where it should go.

[SC4BOY 20]

Not sure what the issue is, but try to be sure to rotate through cities in your region to allow city/city balances to update regularly.. they only update when you play and save each city

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

You don't say what anti-pollution measures you have taken.  I assume you have lots of trees, graveyards, and water purification facilities, and remote garbage processing of some kind.

You say that adding fast transit links between the two cities has cost too much, but you know you don't have to have much.  Have you tried passenger rail separated from freight rail?  This is the cheapest inter-city transit you can get other than roads.  Passenger stations are cheap and have relatively high capacity and their own parking.  Connecting bus lines to them also helps.  In busy areas, you can easily have a passenger station every block.

Subways are a downfall unless you are filthy rich, but short stretches of subway can help.  Just don't get carried away.  They are best used in crowded downtown areas, and can be transitioned to elevated rail to reach suburbs.  You can also use Ground Light Rail for appearances sake, but remember all of these have no parking, so you will need bus lines and/or parking buildings.

Populations do not consist only of workers.  Look at your demographics and you'll see you have children, retirees, and often stay-at-home mothers.  Only about one-third to one-half of your Sims need jobs.  Try injecting a few Sims into your scenario and see what happens to them over the years.  It will give you some insight into the way the game writers thought of families.

For testing purposes, you should copy the region out of the game to a backup area, then run.  If you don't like where things have gone, you can restore the checkpoint and retry it.

[The Good King 3]

@N_O_Body: I have taken all measures to kill pollution, and desirability is at full. I was thinking of installing a small busing system, as that was the first alternate transit the old Vault incurred. The problem could be derived from me not taking things slow enough. I rushed into the new Vault because I could half remember the old city plan. Again, patience is my virtue in SC. The main problem is, Orin has always held its commercial base in Vault, but now that the proportions and job pools are a little skewed, (4,000:8,000 vs. 40,000:70,000) , Orin is literally sucking the life out of Vault.

I have 2 options I can think of to fix this: 1) Recreate Orin so that it once again grows with vault rather than draining it. 2) Cut off all ties to Orin, grow a normal city without the exaggerated commerce, and when I have a large enough population to supply the true vault, (Again, it starts to drain me before I've even been awarded anything,) remake the ties and reconstruct the city back to its original form.

[tommy949 0]

Well for me,I have a city with 97,000 residents in my first week with 182,000 commercial jobs and 4000 industrial. The problem I have is commute time. The other city is like 4000-6000, Guangzhou, it used to have like 50-60,000 residents but I tried to start a riot and failed so yeah. Guangzhou has like 23000 commercial although it should have a hell lot more.

[Tysons4 68]

regional commercial and industrial should add to a percentage of regional residence... why have so much more commercial when you have no sims to work these jobs... looking to have abandoned city?

[local_authority01 3]

Maybe your wealthier and more educated sims pushed out all of the low wealth sims when you educated them. A business can suffer if there are not enough of the specific types of sims to employ. Maxis programmed the game so that high wealth can always overtake low wealth. This leads to low wealth sims being constantly pushed out of every city and can lead to demand and unemployment problems.

The best measure against this is to raise tax levels for wealthier sims so that they don't takeover the entire city. Also if you are in short supply of low wealth sims, find thier residences and make them historic. It also helps to go play regional if your city starts to stagnate.

[The Good King 3]

I know this topic is basically over and done with, but I would like to point out for anyone who has had an issue similar to this that what local_authority01 said is very good advice. Very sadly, vault has been long lost thanks to my broken mirror luck with computers. However, if I remember correctly, Vault's low-wealth neighborhood was a very specific and separate area (one of the tips of the L-shape that was vault) from the downtown. (The corner of the L-shape.) I had have forgotten to remake the low wealth section when I remade vault, and so I had a no low wealth problem.