Residental Question

[joshriddle577]

I have a decent city, 36,000 residents. And what I did was made most of it low wealth, up until about the first 20,000 came by. Both commerical and residental is low wealth.

I read the little booklet thingy that comes with the game to see if I can't find an answer there and it said you could start zoning for high wealth residental at around 26,000 residents. So at around 30,000 I zone over my medium wealth zones with high wealth, and I zone medium wealth over low.

Next thing that happens is I get my first highrise apartment. Diplidation literally runs over it and then it is abandoned. And then after that I check desirability, and kinda patch everything up, upgrade the road networks, transit, and all those what-nots. And medium wealth stays, and then high wealth still abandons. So next I check the transit query, and the roads running through the sector where I am trying to get hirise residental are all oneway roads, I think they were up around 7-800 cars, around 60 or 70 buses.

So then next I realize that there is moderate pollution lingering around. This one stumps me because the medium stage apartments are doing fine, where as a hirise goes up and it instantly abandons. If it isn't traffic (how much traffic can a oneway road handle anyway?), I thought it would be the pollution. Everything else is adequate.

I was wondering if it really is pollution that is driving them off? Because both the hirises and the midrises are low wealth. Does desirability/traffic and other whatnots affect higher growth stages? Or is it something else that is keeping them off?

Any help on this issue is greatly appreciated.

[Andreas]

First of all, there are no low, medium and high wealth zones, but low, medium and high density zones. All wealth levels can grow on all zones (with the exception of farm zones), the only difference is the size of the buildings. But don't worry, this is a common misconception among many beginners.

In your case, abandonment is probably not traffic-related, but more related to the available number of jobs. Usually, the residential demand is quite high at the beginning, and if you start zoning medium and high density residential zones, larger buildings will pop up quickly if your city is thriving. But if you don't keep up creating new commercial and industrial zones, you'll get dilapidated residentials very soon due to unemployment. Ideally, you should add some COM and IND zones immediately while zoning more RES - and it wouldn't hurt if they are not too far away.

[jmyers2043]

Andreas is absolutely right. Query the house. It will probably say that it's abandoned due to long commute. That's because the resident can not find a job. Remember - low wealth Sims like to work in ID, CS$ and on farms. So at the beginning of your city a number of dirty industrial buildings will pop up when R$ first move into your town. Sims will get educated if you have some schools and those R$ will upgrade to R$$ or R$$$. High wealth Sims like to work in I-HT and commercial office buildings. It does not naturally follow that the dirty industrail zones will automatically upgrade to high tech. You may have to increase the value of the land near your industry. Plant some grass or trees. Or you can zone another industrial area away from polluting dirty industry. Also increase the land value in your business district so that the CS$ will upgrade to CO$$$. Make a neighbor connection. The city next door may have enough available jobs to satisfy demand.

[joshriddle577]

Thanks for the help so far.

Anyway, I have a fairly large Industrial zone right across the street, and there is plenty of Comemrcial nearby, I may try seeing where they work and how many jobs industry is providing.