A Cities Growth

[kristoferpetit 3]

Hi All.

I have a city with about 160,000 sims and the growth has plateaued. I have plenty of residential area in the city, that no one is building on. The jobs of the city is mostly supplied by neighbouring cities, but i do have a large commercial area. Taxes are low, traffic is good, crime, health etc etc is all good. Have lots of parks also. What can i do to get growth to speed up?

Thanks in advanced.  

[Wuzzle 1]

Oddly enough trees help will help in this situation.  By holding alt + ctrl + shift and selecting god mode you'll get access to all the god mode tools (including planting forests) that you lost when you went to mayor mode for the first time, so you'll be able to plant lots of trees very quickly.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Let's level the playing field:

 

1.  What version of the game have you got?

 

2.  Do you have NAM (32)?

 

3.  How about an overall screen shot of your city showing the GUI for the budget?

[kristoferpetit 3]

Sim City deluxe and yes i have NAM. Will post a picture a little later

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

OK. Looking forward to your picture.

 

Here's some things to look at:

 

How is your population by age graph?  Also check the same display.  If the graph is skewed to the right and the display has a number of blue areas, try dropping in some more museums and parks.  Your Sims are getting well beyond school age and want to be entertained.  If you do this, you will get the Opera House soon, so make sure you have the Opera House Fix.

 

Check on your school budget.  Schools with very low attendance in blue areas should be replaced by museums.

 

If you have an active Central Business District, try to direct more traffic through it.  This increases commercial demand and may result in more building of commercial properties with the result that you will get more residential demand.

 

Do you have a commercial airport?  This increases demands in commercial areas.

 

As has already been stated, adding trees has park effect which ups both residential and commercial demand.

 

Do you have some open areas in your commercial areas?  (Plazas!)  Workers need someplace to have their lunch.

 

Try zoning some areas that are already built to a higher density.  If you don't change the zoning type the upgrades will be gradual.

[cogeo 960]

Do you have any demand type, even CS$ which you have not satisfied? These employ poor sims. but hey, they are jobs too! You can attract some more sims with these (get them a low-paid job), but you can educate them and increase CO demand then. And as Moose said check your city stats for possible demand caps. If you are not close to hitting a cap, adding cap-buster lots won't help. If you instead have a desirability problem (positive demand which you cannot turn to development), consider adding trees, parks (for your R areas) and/or plazas or landmarks (for your C areas). I would also recommend against setting your taxes too low (considerably lower than the neutral - for your city size - rate). But as you said you have undeveloped R zones, which sounds like you have low or zero or negative R demand, which in turn rather suggests that there's a lack of jobs, so creating more jobs (in the same city or in a neighbour) should be your first priority.

[kristoferpetit 3]

I must add, I use a money cheat. So taxes are at zero. Will do some work to my city as suggested and post pictures (working at the moment so waiting til I get home)

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Unless the money cheat is totally controlled by you (moolah) I would lose it.  Set your taxes to something reasonable (7%) and use toll gates on all your neighbour connected roads/highways.  Income generating lots are generally a problem.  If your treasury is more than 100 Million, I'd use moolah to drop it down to the 50 million range. 

 

In my list above, I neglected to mention desirability displays.  These may very well tell the tale.