Thank you everyone for the wonderful comments. I wanted to go in depth on how to control the residential growth of your city. Of course you know it is impossible to plop Residentials. But today we are going to review/learn how to control the growth of your residentials. In my CJ all the residential buildings are fully functional and none are abandoned (knock on wood).

First thing we need to do is Check the demand of your map. Sometimes there can be a demand for only commercial and not residentials. If there is no demand for residentials, they will not grow. As you can see here on the chart below I have demand for R$$, R$$$, CO$$$ . I-AG , I-D, I-M , I-HT

Find a residential that you want to use that fits your demand . In this case, I am looking for a R$$ that can fit the feel of a small American town. I chose the 1935 Marion house. Now I load it up into the Lot Editor.

Add your effects to the lot. The bats usually come in lots that are not complete so you may want to add your own touch to the lot based on your surrounding areas.

First I add the mandatory things like mailboxes, driveway textures, garage, etc.

Now we move to the backyard. Lets place the textures

We add then add some backyard props.

Now we are done with the Lot. Save as... Change name. Also keep in mind that this is a Stage 3 R$$. It tells you on the bottom right corner of the editor next to Growth Stage.

Now we need to make sure that it works in the game with the correct properties. We have to Open Ilive reader. Make sure you make copies of the files before you begin modding. First we need to see how many people actually live in this house. If it is too high or low we can change the amount to fit the demand of our city. Open up the .desc file of the building you are working with. Load up exemplar. This file contains the Capacity Satisfied values. These values tell you the maximum amount of people that live/work in that building. I have highlighted it for you.

The capacity satisfied values are in Hexadecimal form. You can use a hexadecimal to decimal converter to find out what numbers you want to use. The value of this R$$ before I changed it was (0x00000002A) 42; this was too high for a house this size and technically the demand is not there for it. So as you can see in the example below I changed the R$$ value to (0x0000000C) 12 and the R$ value to (0x0000000F) 15. The red highlighted location that shows 0x0000000f and 0x0000000C is where you would change the values. The top is for R$ and the bottom is for R$$. Hit Apply on the right 1st and than hit apply on the bottom 2nd. Click Save...

Now we need to Change the Growth Stage. This will guarantee that it builds as soon as we zone it. In the Ilive reader open up the lot file that you just created in the Lot Editor. Load up Exemplar files. You can see that the growth stage for the lot has a value of 0x03 which means Growth Stage 3. We want to change this to Growth stage 1 which is value 0x01.

We are going to zone the residential lot that we just created next to this house .

And Voila! Within a few months it grows. Make it historical and you're done. As you can see there are commuters and the max size is 12 just like we put in the ilive reader.

And this my friends is how to control residential growths. I hope you enjoyed. This should help you in creating cities that you can control based on supply and demand.