Unemployment problems

[taikiat 0]

My city has a residential population of 110k, and total amount of jobs amount to around 50 - 60k, no job zots show up in areas and abandonment begins.

I've thought of these problems but the solutions to them seems short-term:

 

Firstly, transport. The city is pretty dense, so I thought  I might incorporate subways (never thought they were worth it until around 80k) so yea, the zots went away for awhile but came back. Average commute time: 70 mins. is that too high?

 

Demand cannot be the problem as the green blue yellow bars are off the charts and I do zone in desirable areas. Water, roads, bus stops, subways, all provided. Shouldn't be much problem with my infrastructure.

 

So what could be the solution? Maybe my education levels are not high enough? Or do I need neighbours? What percentage of the total population constitutes the workforce?

 

Thanks for answering my question!

[Peorth 18]

Well, unemployment problems can often be simply solved by building jobs in your city or in a neighbor. I rarely get NJZ's, and when I do, only briefly. The best way to solve them is to zone more commercial or industrial, but you might want to check other things too:

1. Be sure you do not set your R taxes too low because this creates an artificial demand. The sims move in but cannot find jobs, hence NJZ's and subsequently building dilapidation as they move out. This is especially important for R$$$, which should have the HIGHEST taxes. To create TRUE demand, you should drop taxes for I or C. This stimulates I/C growth, which draws in sims of appropriate wealth level.

2. Job-matching. To illustrate this point, if you place a medium-wealth sim in a city with purely I-D (no civic structures or the like), he or she would NEVER find a job. That is because I-D provides only R$ jobs. When you're getting NJZs, find out first the wealth level of the affected sims. Subsequently you'll know what kind of jobs you need to generate. Note that high-wealth jobs are the hardest to generate since only a fraction of the jobs are for R$$$'s. To illustrate, even if you manage to build a new, say, Wren Insurance (Co$$$) building, out of its maximum of 1401 jobs only 210 or 15% are high-wealth ones. Building new jobs is nice but always pair this with appropriate R taxation.

Regarding commute time, 70 mins is not bad at all. The maximum is 150. Thus your problem is probably in job supply and/or taxation.

[Prophet42 1,503]

Peorth - that is excellent advise.  Right now I'm having a problem in once of my cities of too many R$$$ sims moving in.  Do you have any suggestion on what I should set the tax rates at to create a true demand? 

 

Taikiat - Another way to alleviate the no job situation (besides Peorth's excellenct advice) is to provide connections to neighbor cities.  Of course you will have to develope the neighbor cities with commercial and industrial to provide the needed jobs.  Good luck.  Oh, BTW welcome to Simptropolis

[Peorth 18]

Prophet42, I usually set my R$$$ tax rate to 9.5% . It is not necessary to manipulate the R$$$ tax rate early on because high-wealth sims do not move in until your city is fairly developed. I usually drop it to 9.0%, then gradually increase it.

To understand how taxation works, you should use two things, namely the Jobs and Population graph and the chart below:

____\_Jobs Provided
Jobs_\R$___R$$__R$$$
CS$___100%_0%___0%
CS$$__68%__27%__5%
CS$$$_62%__30%__8%
CO$$__40%__50%__10%
CO$$$_20%__65%__15%
IA____100%_0%___0%
ID____100%_0%___0%
IM____50%__45%__5%
IH____10%__80%___10%

You should then look at your proportions of your jobs at the graph. Say, if the bulk of your jobs are Co$$$ and Co$$, it basically means that you have the ability to the employ more R$$$. The opposite is true in a scenario like most jobs belonging to, say, CS$$ and I-M.

Example
Only jobs in a city are as follows:
CS$$$ jobs = 5000 x 8% = 400 R$$$ jobs
I-M jobs = 5000 x 5% = 250 R$$$ jobs
total = 650 R$$$ jobs

As far as I know, this however does NOT mean you should only have 650 R$$$ sims. The population graph shows the entire age range of R$$$ sims, including children and elderly (i.e. non-working), and thus you cannot directly relate it to the population graph. In addition, the simulator doesn't probably use a fixed rate (e.g. 20% of Sims in a particular wealth class are working). This is because the simulator factors in the shifts in your population over time as influenced by education and the like; thus the working percentage is not a fixed rate but a constantly changing variable.

Anyway, to make things short a R$$$ tax rate of 9.5% is pretty good in my experience. Some people have advocated 10%, but at that level the simulator gives tax warnings. I believe the optimal value lies somewhere between 9.5 and 10%, I still have to experiment a bit regarding this matter. Lastly, I believe you should keep your R$$$'s no higher than 10-12% of your population. The actual percentage will vary on your job distribution but that's up for the gamer to learn by themselves, and it's a good exercise too

[taikiat 0]

Alright, so I'll raise my taxes, I think that's the problem cos my R$$$ taxes are still at 7.5, I'm not very good with fiscal/monetary policies so yea, guess I'll try and tinker with em. And btw, I'm zoning lots of zones, but they're not developing as quick as before, maybe I'll lower my residential influx and at the same time get my industries going.  I'll also develop 2 neighbouring cities, demand's too sweet to ignore lol. Thanks for the advice guys.