Abondonment/Job Problems

[ZorusX 1]

Greetings friends.

I have an issue I've been trying to correct, but I think its getting worse now.

Pictures are worth 1000 words:

http://img849.imageshack.us/img849/7209/dufftonproblems1.jpg

Ok, so this is the situation: I hit about 250k sims in (mostly) this tile. The other major tiles are a large industrial sector and an Ag sector. I started to run into really bad dilapidation in R$$$ buildings. I figured this was because my services were of such high quality that developers were only building R$$$ buildings which my economy couldn't support, so they immediately degraded to R$$ or R$. Ok, fine, makes sense. So I created a 'ghetto' in the tile next door with R$ and R$$ so they could work in my commercial center along with the R$$$ sims that live there.

This cured the dilapidation in the core and north, but in the east it remained. Now i needed to employ some of those sims I just zoned for. SO i expanded my IND zones next door (a LOT, maybe 66% to 100% extra jobs). So then i fill out this residential suburb (circled in blue in the picture) and it is spammed with intermittant no job zots, and absolutely plagued by abandonment and dilapidation. The eastern edge of the highrises is also affected by dilapidation. (dilapidation is circles in red) Route query is claiming they are being abandoned due to long commute time, but I've read enough on this site to know that long commute time is an umbrella term for a few different problems.

I am using NAM and have a subway linking much of the map. No bus system, and a monorail only for the commercial center.

Hope you guys can help cause after much problem solving, I'm stumped on this one!

On an semi-related note, how do I go about increasing monorail and other station capacities to their recommended values, not Maxis'. The ones in my core are already strained to 250% ++ more and obviously with NAM in increases track capacity but not station capacity, which is a problem.

  Edited April 14, 2011 by ZorusX  

[z1 566]

I am using NAM and have a subway linking much of the map. No bus system, and a monorail only for the commercial center.

I would recommend putting in a bus system. I think that this is at least part of your problem; a healthy commercial sector (i.e., one that provides jobs for Sims) requires a fair amount of road traffic, and subways and monorail don't provide that.

On an semi-related note, how do I go about increasing monorail and other station capacities to their recommended values, not Maxis'. The ones in my core are already strained to 250% ++ more and obviously with NAM in increases track capacity but not station capacity, which is a problem.

Use Ilive's Reader. It's very intuitive for simple tasks like this; you don't even need the manual. Just set the Transit Switch Traffic Capacity to the capacity you want. If the station contains a Catalog Capacity property, set that to the same number. You can enter it in decimal and it will automatically be converted to hex.

[ZorusX 1]

I would recommend putting in a bus system. I think that this is at least part of your problem; a healthy commercial sector (i.e., one that provides jobs for Sims) requires a fair amount of road traffic, and subways and monorail don't provide that.

Hmm, I'll certainly give it a shot. Though currently it is quite healthy and customers are high. But it could certainly be pushed up even more if buses provided additional customers as well as relieve some traffic problems.

Thanks for the suggestions, I'm going to try out that reader as well.

[ZorusX 1]

Placing bus stops did help the area, but that whole side of town is still suffering a lot from dilapidation. I'm trying to use the route query to see where they are going, but failed commutes or no commutes don't show up, so I don't know how to fix the problems.

Does anyone have any more ideas on what to try to fix these problems?

Also, thanks for pointing me to ilive's reader. Although I don't think its quite as intuitive as you said, it wasn't all that difficult to change the capacities for my stations. It'll probably come in handy later too

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

After fixing up the reasons for abandonment, which is usually a routing problem, you can use the god mode tree trick to refresh your abandoned buildings. Just go into god mode and paint them with god mode trees. Takes a while, but it works.

[ZorusX 1]

After fixing up the reasons for abandonment, which is usually a routing problem, you can use the god mode tree trick to refresh your abandoned buildings. Just go into god mode and paint them with god mode trees. Takes a while, but it works.

God mode trees? Is the ability to do this provided through a mod?

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

After fixing up the reasons for abandonment, which is usually a routing problem, you can use the god mode tree trick to refresh your abandoned buildings. Just go into god mode and paint them with god mode trees. Takes a while, but it works.

God mode trees? Is the ability to do this provided through a mod?

No. It is just a quirk in the game. You get to god mode by pressing CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+click on the god mode icon. got this one from Selles, and it works just fine for me.

[ZorusX 1]

Ha! the god mode trick is certainly handy, thanks for that.

I've been messing with the trees though, and it does not seem to be helping my dilapidated buildings. This seems to work on a abandoned ones though. Even after spamming trees for a couple of minutes on some dilapidated buildings they still don't regain their residents of full wealth potential. Does this only work on fully abandoned buildings?

[Mithrik 562]

There is only one reason then: demand, check your RCI. What indicates you? And as far as I know, an abandoned building normally takes a lot of time to recover it's residents, if it ever recovers them.

[ZorusX 1]

There is only one reason then: demand, check your RCI. What indicates you? And as far as I know, an abandoned building normally takes a lot of time to recover it's residents, if it ever recovers them.

Right now in my core city the demand is maxed for R$ and R$$, and about even for R$$$. But on the eastern side of my city there is a whole ton of R$$$ buildings dilapidated (that is, with reduced wealth residents living inside). My goal is to either bring back the appropriate class of residents to these buildings, or to have the sims replace them with lower wealth buildings so they don't have to house reduced wealth residents in the first place. But the sims seem to always prefer to construct high wealth buildings, and then house many many lower wealth sims in them, thus making them dilapidated. This makes for very crappy looking cities.

Even with maxed R$ and R$$ demand, they still build R$$$ anyways instead of building the needed wealth class buildings... this doesn't make sense to me.

[Piano Man 3]

There is only one reason then: demand, check your RCI. What indicates you? And as far as I know, an abandoned building normally takes a lot of time to recover it's residents, if it ever recovers them.

Right now in my core city the demand is maxed for R$ and R$$, and about even for R$$$. But on the eastern side of my city there is a whole ton of R$$$ buildings dilapidated (that is, with reduced wealth residents living inside). My goal is to either bring back the appropriate class of residents to these buildings, or to have the sims replace them with lower wealth buildings so they don't have to house reduced wealth residents in the first place. But the sims seem to always prefer to construct high wealth buildings, and then house many many lower wealth sims in them, thus making them dilapidated. This makes for very crappy looking cities.

Even with maxed R$ and R$$ demand, they still build R$$$ anyways instead of building the needed wealth class buildings... this doesn't make sense to me.

I am experiencing almost the exact same issue, we need more discussion on this!

[enclosing silence 0]

I had this problem when a city of mine hit 650k citizens. It spread like syphilis across my city and I ended up dropping roughly 150k citizens. My main problem was too many jobs were being outsourced to neighboring cities along with there not being enough to provide for the population all together.

Since your problem is primarily with R$$$ its probably jobs specific to that wealth level are either not close enough or there are just not enough of them in general. Those being High Tech Industry and Commercial Offices. Check your R$$$ populations against those types of jobs and see how it matches up. If it doesn't match up, then expect to do some rezoning, or zoning for more development of them. If it does match up, then it is a transportation issue.

I just checked back and forth between my cities, paid more attention to those values and was able to fix my problem. It was time consuming, I did a lot of rezoning, but it ended up working for me.

Oh and since you are at the 250k mark... a problem I had when I hit that was even though my EQ level was high, the education grade on the query was low. If you have an Opera House placed... make sure you download the mod to fix it. Its treated as an educational building and they didn't give it a funding slider. After getting that fixed my pop jumped nearly 100k.

Personally, I've tried the whole building a neighboring city simply for industrial development. For me it only worked until my Residential and Commercial city reached a certain population and I was plagued by the brief case of death. Maybe my transportation networks were always shoddy, but I've always had the most success when I built my cities to sustain themselves by mixing all types of jobs and residential wealth levels instead of pushing out the dirty and poor on the neighbors.

  Edited April 19, 2011 by enclosing silence  

[ZorusX 1]

Personally, I've tried the whole building a neighboring city simply for industrial development. For me it only worked until my Residential and Commercial city reached a certain population and I was plagued by the brief case of death. Maybe my transportation networks were always shoddy, but I've always had the most success when I built my cities to sustain themselves by mixing all types of jobs and residential wealth levels instead of pushing out the dirty and poor on the neighbors.

Well, this seems similar to my situaion. I have a neighboring tile which is an industrial wasteland with 65k jobs of ID and IM. My core city does have 26k IHT jobs though. the total residential population is about 400k residents now for the city and its surrounding tiles, with about 200k comm jobs and 120k ind jobs ish. Maybe i just have too many sims travelling between tiles.

[aparrot7 82]

Sims don't likee to drive to other cities for work. I had the same problem in my city, it had many thousand commercial jobs, and many neighboring indutrial jobs. The residents on the outskirts would head into the industrial city, but all the jobs were taken, so they would head into the next one. This chain can be catastrophic. I entered a cycle of demand trying to build buildings, and commute tearing them down. My city was 1,300,000 sims, but could easly have been 300,000 more if the sittuation had not occured. My advice is to establish a better transit system. My city had suffered from urban sprawl, and i could not support the transit needed to get my sims to work. The bus system is the first transit system i use, try to use some on the road bus stops to prevent any knocking down of buildings. Also check your traffic conjestion. To me it seems like you have too many R$$$ residents, and it is a fact that only a small emmount of CO$$$ and CO$$ is accualy used by R$$$, there is a percent rate, but i forget the exact #'s. Its something like most C0$$$ jobs go to R$$ people and some R$$$ people making the wealty have a hard time finding jobs.

[ZorusX 1]

Well, i think I solved my problems, mostly by now.

What I did:

-upgrade transit system (added a bus system and monorails linking all core areas of work with residents)

-demolish dilapidated buildings and some R$$$ so they will be replaced by new ones (This works well if you've solved transit/work issues. DO NOT do too many at once)

-zone a LOT of high tech. Since this is the only job type my sims wanted anymore. This is a bit annoying though cause HT is not dense at all and uses up much space and strains transit.

At this point my city is mostly recovered.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Let us not forget one of the prime reasons for abandonment in mature cities: Superannuation. Sims age like everybody else. They get old, retire, and eventually die. Be sure to keep an eye on your Population by Age graph. You should always have a supply of younger Sims being educated upwards.

If your schools are being abandoned (low student registration), then take a hard look at the neighborhood. It is probably aging out, and no kids are being born. You may decide to do some serious urban renewal at this point. Cities grow, and then shrink unless you keep on top of them. There is nothing wrong with taking out an occasional older patch and replacing it with a new one. You may find you need to build a tripartite area with industry, commercial and residential all in balance. The program is written to want this.

If you can, try to build something attractive to older Sims, with condos and parks, lots of amenities, for the older people to move to when you demolish their old neighborhoods and they won't abandon your city. Just remember that youth must be served.

Nicely browned and with an apple in its mouth, IMHO

One of the things I love about this game is that there is always a problem to solve.

[ZorusX 1]

Wow, that is an interesting thought. I never really thought about it that way before. I tend to let my simulation run a lot too. One thing i was trying to do was zone ghetto type communities with lots of R$ sims. (Like a few blocks worth of projects for example). But its really hard to get the sims to grow what you want

The only thing i noticed with age is younger sims tend to be poorer and less educated. Is there any way to attract the young to your city?

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

The only thing i noticed with age is younger Sims tend to be poorer and less educated. Is there any way to attract the young to your city?

Keep some dirty industry around to employ them, keep some elementary schools with playing fields and parks. You may want to move these areas around. Some high-density housing near the industrial is always good, because poor sims can't afford separate housing, and often don't have cars. Put in some buses.

Sims do reproduce, but not well. They aren't rabbits. These will need middle level housing, and schools.

The high-wealth guys have made it, so they tend of have their kids out of the house, and want a big place with lots of property or a fancy condo.

Sims are just like everybody else, so treat them like people and call on your experience.

[Piano Man 3]

My issue is still that residential demand for all wealth levels are at their maximum levels, however I have zero demand (and mostly negative) for any commercial or industrial except for C$. The result: Most of my city is abandoned/reduced wealth occupants due to unemployment, but nobody seems willing to commute to neighboring cities.

I did find that when I plopped some CS$$$ skyscrapers, the unemployment went away. This isn't natural or realistic though since commercial and industrial demands are almost completely maxxed out in the negative.

  Edited April 22, 2011 by Piano Man  

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

My issue is still that residential demand for all wealth levels are at their maximum levels, however I have zero demand (and mostly negative) for any commercial or industrial except for C$. The result: Most of my city is abandoned/reduced wealth occupants due to unemployment, but nobody seems willing to commute to neighboring cities.

I did find that when I plopped some CS$$$ skyscrapers, the unemployment went away. This isn't natural or realistic though since commercial and industrial demands are almost completely maxxed out in the negative.

Good luck to you. I suppose you have a set of demand mods, and ploppable buildings. My understanding of ploppable buildings is that they don't work if they are residential. They empty out and abandon due to some kind of pathing problem.

I do not use demand mods nor ploppables other than public buildings. I can understand your point if you are making a CJ, but for casual play, I don't really care what buildings I get.

You could, perhaps, start up a neighbor city with lots of zoning for residential and see if that drains your demand.

[Piano Man 3]

Good luck to you. I suppose you have a set of demand mods, and ploppable buildings. My understanding of ploppable buildings is that they don't work if they are residential. They empty out and abandon due to some kind of pathing problem.

I do not use demand mods nor ploppables other than public buildings. I can understand your point if you are making a CJ, but for casual play, I don't really care what buildings I get.

You could, perhaps, start up a neighbor city with lots of zoning for residential and see if that drains your demand.

Nope, no demand mods, and only quality growables for buildings. You are a silly moose! I have been taking the realistic approach to mayoring, and have improved the situation slightly by zoning higher density, adding parks, and adjusting tax rates.

I have been using the god-mode tree tool extensively to add forests to my city, are there any negative side-effects to this?

  Edited April 23, 2011 by Piano Man  

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Good luck to you. I suppose you have a set of demand mods, and ploppable buildings. My understanding of ploppable buildings is that they don't work if they are residential. They empty out and abandon due to some kind of pathing problem.

I do not use demand mods nor ploppables other than public buildings. I can understand your point if you are making a CJ, but for casual play, I don't really care what buildings I get.

You could, perhaps, start up a neighbor city with lots of zoning for residential and see if that drains your demand.

Nope, no demand mods, and only quality growables for buildings. You are a silly moose! I have been taking the realistic approach to mayoring, and have improved the situation slightly by zoning higher density, adding parks, and adjusting tax rates.

I have been using the god-mode tree tool extensively to add forests to my city, are there any negative side-effects to this?

Well, then, your piano is out of tune. If you are playing with god mode trees, have you tried painting some of your abandoned buildings with them. It seems to revitalize them. Its not immediate, but close in time.

R$ will normally live in high-rise tenements if they are available, especially if they are near the job, and they can either walk or take a bus. Quite often, poor Sims don't have private wheels. So you should be a good mayor and try to understand the Sims-condition.

[RiCHBoyZ 75]

i been playing simcity game quiet number of years. beginning with simcity2000, simcity3000/unlimited and until now simcity 4 which is deluxe version that i bought. with my experiences i found out that abandon houses merely cause by 2 thing; no job or commute time. i sure you has solved the commute time by build more accessing networking such roads, rails, subways and etc... but still suitcase bag icon appear on top of buildings and worst case your building abandon by residents. WHY? look at your zoning system, cs and id area are too far from residential areas. even you build tons of roads/rails/buses/subways still getting those sign. if you think that your city has everything positive and the negativity are in your sims itself. try to bring most cs closer, also multi-build your cs tile to different sizes like 3x3, 3x4, 4x4, 4x5, or even 6x6. in this case better cs building will grow and better number of job occupancy will be created. remember in real life no one like to travel before the sun rise to go to work and come home after the sunset. cheers!

[Piano Man 3]

I found a solution to my problem.

I found out that I had such high demand for all residential incomes because of my exceedingly low tax rates (3-4%). Because land values are all high, high-wealth residential buildings would almost always take priority over the lower wealth structures. Due to the pyramid structure of income brackets, there weren't enough R$ and R$$ residents to support demand for high-wealth employers. So, what I did was tax R$$$ enough that their demand went to zero or below, allowing mid and low-wealth high-rises to develop. This increased my population, and therefore demand for all levels of Commercial Service/Office and Industry (largely high-tech).

A little bit unrealistic (people don't move to places where job prospects are poor under any circumstances), however my problem is on its way to being solved.

[Coppertown2 30]

So I have a similar problem but on a more ridiculous level, I have a region with 9 cities, I've gotten to the point were there are more jobs than people in some of the cities, this is one of them:

Upper left: Industrial area with more than 9,000 jobs, upper right: a new commercial area with more than 2,000 jobs.

I built that commercial area because that corner of the map always had the "Abandoned due to commute time" problem... well it's been 2 sim years since I built it and NO ONE goes to work there! I've built new streets, more bus stops, even a new subway line, I've tried the tree thing with no results, I have completely demolished every house there and wait for them to rebuilt, and people are still complaining about long commute times (city average commute time is 6 minutes...)and, as I already mentioned before, no one, works in this area! What's going on!?

[Kusajika Yachiru 9]

Sounds like some Sims want to work in a near by city but can't find a route to it. Once you get other cities connected to each other, they feed off each other. So try spending time making a perfect blance between your cities.

[Coppertown2 30]

Sounds like some Sims want to work in a near by city but can't find a route to it. Once you get other cities connected to each other, they feed off each other. So try spending time making a perfect blance between your cities.

I have a massive Subway system connecting all of the cities, it handles almost 100,000 sims, As I built it I closed all street connections to the other cities. (This lowered commute time and I make a huge profit off it) I think it works like a charm, but then again, it is the first time I've done such a thing, so I don't know if it's really working

[ZorusX 1]

As far as I know, not all sims want to take public transit. There is always a portion that will take their cars, specifically, the rich sims. I think you can manually change this within NAM to allow any wealth class to take whatever route is fastest. You might also try reconnecting your avenues and adding a bus system.

  Edited May 5, 2011 by ZorusX  

[Piano Man 3]

I have found that you really can't "force" anything in this game to happen. For example, you cannot create a successful commercial area with maxed jobs unless the road traffic is already there. Obviously you can zone light commercial and it'll probably develop, but it won't dent a tall demand-bar. Once a zoned lot has something develop on it, those businesses have employees that come from somewhere. You'll need to find where that is, and place jobs there.

If the road traffic in that area is weak, industrial jobs are likely the better option. Convincing them to work there may involve cutting off access to other employers, or demolishing them entirely. Finding and viewing these patterns is especially difficult in a huge gridded city. I find that developing cities through districts a few blocks in size and limiting exit/entry through one road makes understanding everything easier.

-oh,

and entrance/exit to these districts always creates an area of heavy (but controllable) traffic that's perfect for some commercial development.

  Edited July 10, 2011 by Piano Man