Average Residential Income keeps "decaying"

[shlarin]

The largest city in one of my regions has about 900,000 people and 1,800,000 commercial jobs.  The average EQ there is 192 and it's composed of roughly 7% R$, 85% R$$, 8% R$$$ sims.  The vast majority of the buildings are CO $$ and CO $$$ (about 800,000 for each.)

When you open the residential income graph, it shows the income going downwards over time.  It reached a peak of about 70,000 early on (in the first few hundred sim years) but has kept going down with brief periods of recovery every now and then.  Right now, at about year 680, the average income is only 20,000..  it has hit a low of about 6,000 several years ago!

And if you're wondering, this city has a large population of people from ages 20-40 and there's barely any "no work" suitcase zots around..  so unemployment can't be blamed.  I've had slum cities with average EQ in the low 100's and large proportions of R $ workers having higher average incomes (around 30,000-40,000.)

I suspect the "calibration" of the average income calculator is off as it seems to randomly drop by over 50% every once in a while without any noticeable and drastic changes in the city occurring. 

[tag_one]

Welcome to the club Shlarin 
The changes are nothing to worry about, it happens when all the old people in your city die and young people with a lower EQ replace them. It looks a bit odd, but it won't harm your city
More information can be found here: http://sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=8010.0

Hope this helped you

[chris0101]

Merjin, I have a similar situation, only for me, the EQ didn't drop at all - it stayed a constant 200. My population is also distributed fairly evenly across the board. Income dropped for some reason from about 110k (around 40% of my city's residents were R$$$) to about 60k.

No idea what happened there.  I'm trying really hard to get it up. Health and education are all top notch, and my mayor rating, population, etc. are stable. I'm not sure though how to get it back up to what it should be. By the way, I do not have the CAM installed right now.

[RippleJet]

There is probably some sort of error in how that average income is calculated in the game... the drops in income are often too large in order for being able to explain it only based on the change of average age of the population.

On the other hand, the average income has no meaning for the simulators. It is only secondary information based on the underlying age and education of your population.

Thus, I'v'e never really cared for it and just happily kept on playing.

[chris0101]

Interestingly enough, after playing the city for a few decades, there have been no major changes with the residential tax income. It has been relatively proportional to the population. This implies that the income itself may not really be in decline.

In theory, the average income ought to be heading towards $300,000 Simoleans. Not sure why.