cyburbia

Bumpies! I fired up SC4 again for the first time in a while. Ifanyoje gets active making Buffalo BAts again, a few suggestions: Local chains: Anderson's, Mighty Taco, Teds Generic Greek restaurant Frame houses with retail on the first floor; for example along Clinton in Kaisertown/. Two-flats and semi-bungalows

I'm a practicing urban planner, complete with AICP (American Institute of Certified Planners) certification. Most of my work now is comprehensive planning -- helping create a vision for a community -- but I worked quite a bit in current planning -- day-to-day zoning administration and development review. Imagine that you zoned land residential in SimCity 4 -- prime rea estate, near an avenue and expressway exit -- but instead the tiles turned from green to blue, and a shopping center was built instead? What if you tried to implement a city beautification ordinance, but it was turned off the next year, because the Sims that manage billboard companies complained? What if you tried to rezone an uundeveloped tile from commercial to residential, and got hit with a lawsuit? Welcome to the real world of planning. I know many planners who play SimCity, but to them it's just another diversion, like any other computer game. Perhaps more so than others, they are frustrated by the game's limitations; it's not just point-and-zone, but you also have to consider politics; hundreds of environmental, market and social variables the game can't possibly model; and the planning process as spelled out in state planning enabling acts in the US. The biggest thing missing from SimCity 4; a planning commission that would otherwise vote yay or nay on the city's planning efforts, and many types of development proposed by an interested party. Soem of us credit SimCity with the glut of planners graduating from college. It's great for recognition of planning as a profession, but it makes it harder for those trying to find their first job with a planning agency. I run Cyburbia, an urban planning-related Web portal that will be celebrating its tenth anniversary in November. The URL is http://www.cyburbia.org . The (very busy) forums are at http://www.cyburbia.org/forums , but please understand many regulars don't look kindly on one-trick posters who only talk about SimCity; most users are real planners. Yes, we occasionally discuss SC4, but it's not the intent of the site; that's what Simtropolis is for.

Some silly requests: * A ploppable gay bar. Brings in the creative class to a lower income area, gentrifying the area. However, when you first plop it down, it attracts protesters. Maybe take a regular urban-style two-story retail building, black out the wondows, add some subtle rainbows, and put up a sign that reads The Manhole or Buddies or something similar. * A Kim Jong Il statue.

For those Buffalo architecture fans out there, how about a Buffalo-style two-flat?

Buffalo native here. The region looks great! It's interesting to see how things will develop when zones are established and roads follow a different route than what is in real life Buffalo. One thing about IRL Buffalo that you probably won't encounter in SimBuffalo - the early presence of the Buffalo Creek Indian Reservation, lake effect snow, a corridor of heavy industry and the former smell of Bethlehem Steel stymied development south of the city for a long time. The result: development skewed to the northeast. The city's most affluent neighborhoods are all north of downtown, and the wealthiest suburbs (Amherst, Clarence) are to the northeast, in what could safely be considered swampland. Orchard Park and East Aurora are catching up, though, especially since Bethlehem Steel closed down in the 1980s. Slightly OT: building tiles. Great work on the Marine Midland Tower and Niagara Mohawk building! If I learn how to use the bulding editor, I wouldn't mind creating some smaller flavor of Buffalo-style buildings. For example, two-flats ... (from my site, http://www.cyburbia.org) Houses with businesses on the first floor Elmwood Avenue! Allentown Also ... Mighty Taco! Tops, or as they say back home, Taaaaaaaaps A Cheektowaga house (Virgin Mary, lawn ornament and Polish flag props) Big grain mills (should be easy) Walden Galleria (20x40?) Main Place M&T Tower Broadway Market East Side telescoping houses Metro Bus/Rail vehicles University at Buffalo Ellicott Complex (Edit ... poop! Images broken. See http://www.cyburbia.org/gallery for lots of everyday Buffalo images.