Too many commuters taking jobs?

[clem 1]

Mods used:

NAM

I-HT jobs fix

Census repository

No kickout lower wealth: I only installed this recently, the city grew to its current problematic state without it

 

My city has 115k population, with two connected neighbors that have 80k and 20k each. For a while now I've been experiencing dilapidation in some of my residential and commercial buildings. Usually they downgrade in wealth, but sometimes they don't and they just flip between dirty and clean looking as their occupancy constantly fluctuates. I'm not sure when exactly it started happening, but it's been since at least since around 80k population I think. RCI demand is very strong all across the board. After installing Census Repository I think the issue might be that there are way too many people coming in from the 80k city to work. That city doesn't have very many jobs, because I intended it for it to be a commuter town filled with R$ in order to keep my larger city higher wealth. But I think now things are out of whack. As you can see in the Census screenshot, there are 63k commuters coming in from SimNation, and 47k of my city is unemployed (if I'm reading it right) although there are no zots anywhere. High unemployment would definitely cause residential dilapidation, but I'm not sure about the Commercial problems because the dilapidated buildings still show that they have enough employees and customers, they're just downgraded in wealth. Do you think this could be my problem, and if so how would you approach solving it? I guess I have to either tear down the residential population of the neighbors, or build more jobs in their own towns so they don't have to commute. But I'm afraid of making thing worse either way I go. Let me know if you need any more information or screenshots.

[clem 1]

I made a backup of my region and deleted the neighboring cities just to see what would happen. To my surprise, the numbers didn't budge even after a few years. I still have 63k commuters coming in from the ether, but commercial demand tanked I guess because of the drop in regional population. So now I really don't know what the problem is.

[jeffryfisher 2,176]

Do you have the High-Tech bug-fix mod installed? Without it, your high-tech industry demands people who can't reach the jobs there (I did say *bug*).

[xxdita 1,097]

Commuters from SimNation as reported by the Census Repository isn't quite accurate terminology. This is a measure of extrapolated demand from other connected cities. 

To monitor actual commuters, you need to do a route query of your neighbor connections. You may have inadvertently created some sort of eternal commuter loop. How's your commute time graph? How is traffic in your city? What type of networks are you using for neighbor connections? 

Try demolishing all neighbor connections in this city. That should do a hard reset for all of the extrapolated data from the region. Open up the demolished neighbor tiles, to establish them as empty. You'll probably need to at least name and save them. Go back to your problem tile and see if re-establishing the neighbor connections has fixed it all. 

The best way to avoid eternal commuters is to create balanced cities. It may not make sense, but Sims need access to jobs. Employers don't care whether those jobs get filled or not. You're more likely to need a small tile of industrial to manage the job supply for the region than a tile of low wealth Sims. 

If you can upload your backup region to Google Drive or something and send me a PM with the link, then I can take a look and get a better sense of what's going on exactly.