scurry

I've been playing this game on and off since I was a kid when it came out, and have never been successful beyond the basics. During this most recent on-again period I have become determined to figure it out. Right now my issue is inexpliciable dilapidation among R-$$ and R-$$$. I have tried taking things really slow, like 10,000 population after 200 years slow. I try to make one small neighborhood at a time and make sure they are all happy before moving on. I make tiny changes and wait a decade or two to observe the effects. I start with all low density and when all their needs are met I replace a couple blocks with medium and wait for them to grow apartments before making a new neighborhood in a different area (same city). The dilapidated R's have police, fire, health, elementary+high school and college coverage, zero garbage, short commute, and nearby parks. I'm using NAM, IRM, and High Tech jobs fix properly applied. The only variable left that I know of is job availability. There should be plenty of jobs, there's tons of C and I-HT around, but I don't know how to get an exact number on things because the in-game jobs+pop graph doesn't break the jobs down by wealth. Whyyyyyyyyy? Please help. It legitimately depresses me that I've never been able to be good at this game

Wow.. these two mods have solved the issue completely. I have started running into a couple new hurdles now at around 32k population, but I will make a new thread for that in the morning. Thank you so much!!

Thanks so much. I caught on to that as well! It seemed that even with 5-6000 R-$ and R-$$ demand, around half of new R zones would grow R-$$$ with only 2000 or less demand. I researched this issue and found people would take hacky approaches like restricting water/civics to certain areas to keep them low-income. Not only does that seem unfun and counter to the way the Maxis intended you to play, but it also seemed it would be difficult if not impossible for those low-income areas to grow in density. But then you give water/civics to grow densitiy, and rich sims take over.. I think those mods will help a lot. I will start a new city and report back

Out of frustration I said screw it and started zoning a ton and moving really quickly so there is a recent burst that's out of character, but here's a screenshot.