Demand Issues

[Aracari 23]

Hello! I'm getting a bit confused over what is going on with demand in one of my cities and hoping someone can enlighten me.
The city has ~250 000 people. Demand is consistently high for CS$, CS$$, I-D and I-HT, usually negative for everything else. I've filled huge areas with I-HT and it hasn't seems to make a difference, and I-HT hasn't even fallen at all.

The census repository shows I'm nowhere near hitting my demand caps for residential:

Yet if I go into the neighbouring city, (for which this city is the only one connecting), I have lots of R$ and R$$ demand.

I can't find anything obviously wrong with the original city. All my education/hospitals are properly funded (I did delete a private school that was over capacity), crime is low, little water pollution etc. Relevant mods I have include NAM, Industrial revolution, SPAM, various fixes (including opera house and I-HT). Does anyone have any suggestions for why I might not be seeing the residential demand in my original city?

 

 

[zzsteven 41]

So many low and medium residentials; so few low and medium wealth commercial and industrial jobs for them to fill.

[jeffryfisher 2,176]

You might also research "neutral tax rate" and start adjusting (all your taxes are still at the default 9%, which shows that you haven't been paying attention).

[Aracari 23]

Thanks both. It wasn't really an issue worth jobs/anything related to that. I fulfilled all the demand for commercial service and industrial, and every single bar was negative. Tried developing neighbor cities, adding a subway system etc., nothing made a difference. My city was in a death spiral- I dropped all the way to 180k population and was losing $10 000 a month. 

Taxes was it though - put taxes down to 8.8% across the board, suddenly had residential demand through the roof. City is now back in black, up to 310k people, and booming! 

Rather counterintuitive tax system. It makes no IRL sense that people will tolerate high taxes in outlying areas, but need lower taxes to be convinced to live closer to the city centre! Will have to play around with it more. Probably I can also fix the strange "issue" where an enormous proportion of my population are R$ and R$$ living in dilapidated higher wealth buildings that couldn't find work.

Thanks again. Some of the game systems are pretty opaque.

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

48 minutes ago, Aracari said:

It makes no IRL sense that people will tolerate high taxes in outlying areas, but need lower taxes to be convinced to live closer to the city centre!

My personal guess on why Maxis created it this way is the little Sims all get together at a town meeting where one of them says: Since there are so many of us now, that Mayor Aracari really should not be taxing each of us so much! There's plenty of revenue in aggregate. And all the other Sims agreed.