boarding house behavior?

[VA gamer]

I am returning to banished after a long time away (vanilla). I have several potential new families ready to form, as well as several older house-holders who have lost their partners. I am trying to free up the under-utilized houses for new families by using a boarding house.

Do potential families not use the boarding house prior to owning their own home? I seem to remember that I was able to put houses up for renovation to force single households into the boarding house, with younger families sometimes taking over the house when renovation is halted.

I've got a boarding house totally unused and potential new families and just not using it. What am I missing.

[Havan_IronOak]

As I understand it, no one moves into the boarding-house FROM any other housing. Nomads will use it and your original colonists will use it but the only way to get others to move in there is to slate house that folks are living in to be demolished. Then the homeless MIGHT move into the boarding house.

Also, no new "Families" get started if the parents are living in the same house.

[Banisha]

From my pinned thread :

----> TIP # 8 : ----->HOUSING VERSUS DEMAND
1. One house can hold one familie of 5 people. Each villager ages 4 years every year.
In average 1 house per 2 adults should keep your population " renew " themselves.
You cannot reach your goal population and then just sit on it, you must make space for the younger generation. A couple will have so many children, then stop. Their kids will live with them until they get their own house. If there isn't one, they won't move out, won't pair up and won't have kids.Building a house IF you want them to move in and have more children is HOW you manage the population (must be aged > 16 but < 40) . You shouldn't "pre-build" because someone will always move in immediately.
HINT---> A boarding house comes in handy when you upgrade wooden houses to stone and to take nomads in. At all other cases citizens prefer a house for themselves to start a family or they stay with mum and dad.
>>>>>>>>>>An adult is someone who isn't a STUDENT or CHILD.
>>>>>>>>>>An adult can marry another adult, or a STUDENT

[Lorebot]

Sadly the Boarding House isn't a place people will move just to 'leave the nest', it's only purpose is to provide housing for the homeless. Families living in a Boarding House won't have kids (as far as I can tell) and new couples/families will not form without a vacant house for them to occupy.

This is a bit counter intuitive for me and I had trouble when I first played the game because I was treating the Boarding House sort of like an apartment building. I didn't understand why the younger generations wouldn't use it to for new couples/families or even as a means to just leave home so I could tell how many houses I needed to build to support the new families that could be formed. The game treats the Boarding House more like a homeless shelter, presumably without many enclosed spaces and probably only curtains for privacy which would prevent new children and explain why no one wants to live there.

I've longed for a mod that would enable a more apartment building like function for the Boarding House since, as it's name implies, I expected it to be more like a boarding house in real life. But I'm not sure if it's even possible to do that without the dev making new tools and behaviors for mod makers to use.

[VA gamer]

thanks all - thought the game mechanic worked a bit differently than it apparently does

[mbutton15]

My first bit of advice is you don't really need to build boarding houses. Homeless will eat from a barn and get warm at someone elses house so you are OK on that front. If you do have a boarding house then, as mentioned above, only the homeless will move in. People only form a couple when moving into a house.

Note a boarding house can only hold 5 families. Although I've not used a boarding house in quite sometime I believe they can breed (and many threads comment the same), but at a slower rate than if they were in a house.

So, delete the boarding house. Then demolish/reclaim single occupant houses and you should be OK. Also check the Town Hall 'families' and 'houses' count and make sure houses never exceed families. If you do then, as Banisha says, to maintain all houses being occupied then couples split up which means they stop having babies.