SimCity 203: Residential Planning

Mousing over the information button on the zoning HUD will give you the following tips on residential zoning:

• Zone residential to attract houses.
• Residents (workers, shoppers, and kids) live in houses.
• Workers earn money at factories and shops.
• Shoppers spend money at shops to buy happiness.
• Build parks and services to attract wealthy houses.
• If a building can't pay rent, it will go abandoned.
• When Sims abandon their homes, they become homeless if they have no money. Otherwise, they leave town.
• Mid- and high-wealth Sims leave town when they abandon their home.

So residential zoning is about four things:

Establishing a Citizenry

Especially important at the beginning of the game, your primary task when zoning residential is to give that first wave of citizens a place to live. The first wave is actually quite demanding. About half of them want to live as close to the factories as possible so they don't have to commute too far to work. The second half want to live as far from the factories as possible because they are wealthy enough to commute.

Given a clean board with only a single huge factory (powered and watered) right at the base of the exit ramp from the highway, if you do nothing else but extend the medium-density boulevard that attaches to the exit ramp all the way across the board and line it with residential zoning, about half of your people will cram themselves in right next to the factory/ramp and the other half will shoot across the board to start their new lives as far away from the riffraff as possible.

Now, I did that just as an experiment; that would actually be a horrible way to begin your game. But the point is clear. Given two types of residential citizens, when you plan your city, you're going to want a high-density, low-wealth neighborhood near the factories and a low-density, high-wealth neighborhood far away from the factories.

This works best if they are cattycorner.

Generating Wealth and Happiness

Wealth is generated by plopping down parks in areas where you want to gentrify the buildings. It doesn't get any more complicated than that.

Slightly more taxing, happiness is an incredibly complex task based entirely on minimizing the things that annoy your Sims (crime, fires, illness, sewage, power outages, garbage, etc.) while simultaneously maintaining enough commercial property to satisfy their unquenchable lust for baubles.

Two rules of thumb when trying to make your citizens happy: have at least one of everything (garbage dump, power station, fire department, etc) and make sure you don't see any blue in the zoning demand indicator at the bottom of the screen.

Balancing Low-, Middle-, and Upper-class Populations

If you have a city with all super-wealthy mansions, that's not a bad thing. If you have a city with all lower-class row homes and slum apartments, that's not necessarily a bad thing either. The reason is because super-wealth citizens can take the highway (or train) to go work in other cities, so you could conceivably have a city just dedicated to mansion storage and rake in big money on residential taxes. You can also have a ghetto slum area full of factories for the reverse reason.

But -- if yours is the only city in the region, you are forced to balance your city to accommodate both high- and low-class citizens. Failure to do so will result in severely stunted growth. The key to ending this problem before it begins is planning, and here's how:

Manipulating Property Values to Generate Revenue

Pick a corner. In that corner, you want one residential neighborhood -- one tight little packet of low-density streets -- abutted with many parks. You will christen that neighborhood the home of the filthy rich and plop a police station at the entrance.

Then, you can shift your focus to the rest of the map and the task of satisfying the needs of your low-class citizens -- who will need everything from grade schools to cops.

If you fail to give wealthy citizens a place to call their own -- forcing them to intermingle -- you will increase your workload exponentially and risk driving them out of your city and away from your skyscrapers (not to mention your coffers).