city has run out of demand?!?

[mcbar88 5]

Afternoon from Sydney, Australia!

 

I have a 'big' city where the demand is just completely different to that of its surrounding cities. ALL the RCI bars in the surrounding cities are through the roof; but the RCI bars in this city are negative. its like ive just 'run out of demand'. perhaps it is to do with the demand caps given the population? i have build all maxis rewards,even cheated to plop them all to see if it woudl help but it didnt. i have zoned areas in the city with parks and hospitals and schools but they wont develop.

 

Details below:

 

The city is in the centre, surrounded by 4 cities (like a '+'). it is a big city tile with the following stats:

- 915k residential (mix of wealths)

- 400k commerical (mainly CO$$, CO$$$; CS$$$ and CS$$)

- 130k industrial (mainly high tech but also some manufacturing)

- education of 200; health of 90; high desirability for all types across the map (except for certain pockets like airports etc)

- low pollution (especially in the city, mainly limited to the industrial 'outer ring;)

- low traffic (high subway and pedestrian use)

- crime of 30 (arrests of 35)

- commute time 40

 

RCI bar summary:

- R$: negative 4k 

- R$$ and R$$$: max negative

- C$: max positive

- C$$: slightly below max positive

- C$$$: max positive

- COSS: negative 4k

- CO$$$: max negative

- i-A: flat

- i-D max positive

- i-M: positive 4k

- i-HT: negative 2k

note in all surrounding cities the RCI bars are max positive; and there are multiple train, subway road connections between all and zones develop straight away.

 

The 2 surrounding cities are as follows (the other 2 are water):

1: 3k farm jobs and a 5k residential (rural farm style city). the RCI demand bar is max for all wealth and type. 

2: 650k residential (mix wealth); 400k commercial (CO$$, CO$$$ and CS$$$); 70k High tech industrial. the RCI demand bar is max for all wealth and type. 

 

have i maxed out the demand cap in the city or is it a bug? need help? cheers

[iLoveMusic 66]

Hello. I'm a relatively new member here myself. Hopefully I can help...

 

It looks to me like the reason your residential demand is all negative is because you already have too many residents in the city, and not enough jobs for them. The stats you posted above show me that you have 915,000 residents, yet only 530,000 jobs for those residents. So nearly half of them are unemployed due to insufficient amount of jobs in your city. More sims won't move to your city because they wouldn't have any jobs waiting for them there. The only thing is I don't know why your Co-$$ and Co-$$$ demand is so low. But if you can develop other types of commercial services, as well as medium-density industrial, then you should be able to attract more sims to your city and fill that large unemployment gap. Also, your city may be outgrowing the agriculture you have in it. May be time to de-zone the farms and replace them with commercial services or medium industry.

 

Maybe a more experienced player can give a better answer than me.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Well, I think I might be able to help. 

 

There is a ratio of Sims:Jobs and the rule of thumb (without CAM) is 2:1.  The demographic model is based on the ideal U.S. core family where the wife stays home to raise the kids.  Single income, lots of kids.

 

I suppose you have NAM but it is not evident from your screenies.  If not, you should get it.

 

530K jobs vs. 915K Sims.  Hmmm.  For 915K Sims you should have 458K jobs yet your demand bars say more jobs.  That doesn't sound like a cap problem. 

 

You've wasted a lot of land on Maxis farms, which don't produce much employment.  Have you thought of using SPAM?

 

You quote the commute time, from the graph I guess.  That graph is very broken and unreliable.

 

Somewhere in there, your city is unbalanced.  If your neighbour connections are working correctly the demand graphs should be about equal.  Is there something funny about your neighbour connects?  You might increase the number of them, or rebuild them.

 

If you need more residential land after starting to fix the city, eat a few farms.

 

Another possibility is that you have used too many plopped lots with jobs and the game simply hasn't settled down from the unexpected injection.  This would normally kill your job demand, so that is probably not it.

[Prophet42 1,500]

Also make sure you have not run into any demand caps.  To relieve demand caps make sure you build any rewards that are available, build parks and plazas and make sure you have at least one of each type of connection to each neighbor (train, road and highway).

[T Wrecks 10,209]

Have you checked taxes? AFAIK, there's a "neutral" tax rate that doesn't affect growth, and if taxes are above that rate, you won't see much more demand for residential and/or commercial. This neutral tax rate isn't fixed, either: the bigger your city gets, the lower it gets. So if everything worked out fine when you had 250,000 Sims, it may stop working when you reach 350,000 (just example figures!). So what you could do to check this is lower taxes for the corresponding RCI categories and let the game run at max speed for a few months - remember that nobody forces you to save your game, so if it doesn't work, you don't lose anything, and the check takes 10 minutes tops.

 

I also see that you have pretty high demand in some categories, namely all three Commercial Service levels and manufacturing industry. Have you tried making the corresponding jobs available to your Sims?

[Cyclone Boom 16,829]

The point about taxes is an interesting one. Basically, it means as the population grows, you should aim to reduce taxes to keep RCI demand in balance. The logic being there's more people to pay the taxes, hence income will increase dramatically if you keep taxes fixed at 9.0%. It's kind of like, "they want taxes to be reduced as the mayor is getting more cash than he needs!"

 

Cogeo posted info about the neutral tax rate. This is the base figure which doesn't help or hinder demand. Developer types are highly sensitive to tax change -- any higher and demand can be greatly reduced (as low as -350%), and setting taxes lower will act like a boost (up to 35%). So with a population of 916,000, based on this you'll ideally want to set taxes at a maximum of 8.7%.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Taxes are a very good point.  I reduce taxes as I go to keep the monthly profit down to something reasonable. 

 

I rarely go below 7% but on my biggest city they are at 6% except I-D at 20% (go away) and 5% for I-A (being nice to farmers).  R - 1,007,884 C - 345,407 I - 45,689 so the Sims:Jobs :: 2.6 which is slightly out of whack.  I don't have any space for more jobs, and I admit I forced it a little.  The demand bars are quite normal.

 

You have nearly 1,000,000 Sims, so try dropping your taxes to 7% for openers.

[Mista_Fuzz 13]

OK,so here is an interesting point that is more of a cheat that anything. I found that in a lot of my cities(that were experiencing negative demand) that if I plopped a residential building (lotplop using the extra cheats dll) in the neighborhood where I wanted them to grow, that the demand would magically increase and people would move in! I could then buldoze the plopped building.

[crishy 57]

If you use the ordinance mod and activated Junior Sports (and I believe there is another crime related one with the same problem, not sure on that one) you might have been affected by a glitch were residential demand simply plummets every time you load a city again with either ordinance activated. You need to remove the ordinances then run the city simulation for a while then reactivate them again.

 

Since I have used this mod since forever I am not sure whether vanilla ordinances (i.e. the default ones without the mod) are affected by the same glitch but you could test it out in case you use them.

 

I do not think it has to do with taxes (assuming they are at 9%) or demand but you could try zoning or plopping for commercial zones and see.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Interesting.  Something you have must be interfering with the ordinances.  I run the junior sports program in most of my cities and this does not happen.  I also don't use any mods having to do with ordinances except the NAM.

 

Generally speaking, I've found that mussing with the games basic internals is just asking for things to go wrong ... go wrong ... go wrong ...

[crishy 57]

The glitch itself is supposedly unavoidable when using said radical demand/ordinance mod (which I have used for a long time) or so I remember reading around long time ago, as I had a very similar problem in my current largest city and fixed it once I remembered that tidbit of information (in which I knew demand and taxes were definitively not the problems).

[Compdude787 916]

I know the Junior Sports ordinance can suffer from integer overflow that will cause it to give you a negative monthly expense, but I don't think that's exactly related to issues with demand. I don't use any of the ordinances anyway, (waste of money for little to no benefit IMO) so what would I know?

[defacto123 14]

I second the point about taxes. The larger your city gets, the more sensitive demand becomes to taxes. Think of it this way: The tax level affects the total demand rather than the marginal demand (the one shown in the demand bar). What I mean by total demand is that if you already have 400,000 population and have +2,000 residential demand, then your total residential demand is 402,000.

 

When your city has only 10,000 residents, a tax cut that increases demand by 1% would translate to a +100 increase. In a city of 500,000, that same tax cut would result in a +5,000 increase. It's actually sometimes frustrating in my bigger cities; often I find myself wanting to curb CO$$$ development, but when I raise the tax by the minimum 0.1%, the demand drops from +5,000 to -6,000, causing existing offices to abandon.

[mcbar88 5]

spot on guys. was taxes. one game month later and they all shot up! fixed

[T Wrecks 10,209]

Good to know. Have fun with your city!