SirRonLionHeart

Nothing as impressive as most of the shots in this thread, but this is my favorite city in this region so far. It's set to explode once the regional population is high enough for the really big skyscrapers to start rolling in. Then the giant hospital won't look completely out of place! And here's a bonus shot featuring the world's most hideous rail interchange. I'll make it prettier...eventually.

-Finnicky ferry placement. It might just be the maps I've used, but it seems very picky about what slope ranges are allowed(why does it even matter when half of it will be on flattened land and the other half over water?). -Repetitive messages, especially the ones about tax rates. Yes, I know that the rich hate the taxes here, because I'm trying to keep them out of this city! Same with dirty & manufacturing industry! -Repetitious buildings. Custom buildings help, but 95% of the ones I've found are skyscrapers, which leaves less-dense areas of the region looking rather boring. -Zoning oddities. When I zone near the edge of the map, I'll often get zones trying to connect to the city border rather than the street. There have also been cases where I've had to temporarily tear out streets to get zones to point to the street I wanted them to connect to, since all the ctrls, alts, and shifts in the world wouldn't make them cooperate. -Landfill garbage not disappearing properly at times(even with shipping off more than enough garbage to a neighbor/waste-to-energy plant). It seems to happen when there's rail touching the landfill zone, and it seems the only solution is temporarily shifting the rail lines away from the dump.

For your first problem: Try taxing the living daylights out of CS$$$ and CO$$$. Well, not so much that the small level of high-wealth commercial you DO need can't be sustained, but enough that the demand won't be high enough for high wealth commercial to replace medium wealth. Soon after the tax hike, a lot of the high-wealth business buildings you have now will be abandoned or will depreciate into being medium or low-wealth business. Bulldoze the abandoned ones, and don't mind the ones that were taken over by lower wealth catagories. For your second problem: My best guess here is that since walking is presumably the slowest form of transit, the commute time is long even though the distance would be short for people driving or using mass transit.