people not moving out of shacks?

[00yiggdrasill00]

ive got apartments laying around half full and a bunch of shacks. am i missing something? ive seen something about families mentioned, do i need things like houses for them instead?

[aqvarivs]

First look at your overlay for employment and housing. If you have no unemployment check wages relative to Caribbean. If you have empty apartments check to see that your workers have the income necessary to move into those buildings. If your wages are good and you still have large number of homeless check where your garages are. Are they near the apartments and your work places? If your garages are too far apart from your housing your people will fill those closest to the garages and leave the others. The Tropican will walk most anywhere except to and from work. Make them do that and they will build shacks as fast as you can destroy them.

Of all the thing to skimp on in T4 when trying to get the most out of your buck, of everything, the last choice should be garages. They are the life blood.

[Mike]

an individual can pay no more than 1/3 of his wages to live somewhere. ie someone paid 6 can only pay 2 in rent. families pool their income together so a 6 married to a six can pay 4. set wages and rents accordingly and people will move into your apartments pronto.

[00yiggdrasill00]

thanks for the tips. i took a closer look at my housing and it apperes that even though it has empty slots on the picture of people its housing is full, i can only assume this means that even though they live there they are not currently present. the change from looking at a work place through me out. really thanks for the tip on garages

[Mike]

the empty slots are when a single person lives there, housing has room for a certain number of couples, like a bunkhouse can house 3 couples, so this means between 3-6 people (and any children, which live with the parents and dont effectively take up space) can live there.

i try and fill up housing by making sure wages and rents line up in such a way that only couples with pooled income can afford the best housing, this puts the most rooves over the most heads.

[Uzi Master]

That doesn't really ensure more people get housed unless you don't have enough homes for everyone in the first place. It is more efficient money-wise, I suppose. If you want more people to get married, and thus reduce the total homes needed, enact Same-Sex Marriages, it increases the rate at which Tropicans marry by quite a bit.

[00yiggdrasill00]

i also found out my population had outgrown my industry and i have a whole heap of unemployment. while its made me REALLY happy for my immediete expansion goals i came to the realization thats no job = no money so el presidente is currently footing the housing bill. its no problem but anyone else with this question had best pay attention to it

[Fly]

As I have laid out in my guide (shamelesss plug, I know), there are a few reasons why people don't move into the apartments provided.

1. The obvious one: They can't afford it. Check how much you're asking as rent and what kind of income the shack dwellers have. If they are students, retired or unemployed, chances are that they simply cannot afford your home. What you can do here is to provide free housing (edict).

2. The houses you built are too far away from where they work. How far "too far" is depends on where they work and how far away the next garage is to the appartment and the work place, unless their work place has a "built in" garage.

[CloudSeeker]

Do this:

1. Build a Ministry and get a education minister
2. Allow same sex marriage (♥♥♥♥ the religious)
3. Free housing
4. Build homes.

Allow same sex marriage allow people to move in together, if you don't allow it they will not marry and they will take up a whole family slot with just 1 person regardless which means they need more homes.

[Mike]

free housing = completely unnecassery and a great way to flush a sizeable money source down the lavatory for a miniscule return in happiness.

[CloudSeeker]

Originally posted by Mike:

free housing = completely unnecassery and a great way to flush a sizeable money source down the lavatory for a miniscule return in happiness.

Apart from that you can easily get so much cash that you need and you make sure you can create the best homes for everyone and they can all move into them which drives your housing happiness to the top. It also prevents people from living in shacks. Its not completely unnecassery since money isn't a real problem.

[Mike]

but people dont lose any happiness from paying you rent. on most islands, free housing is literally giving money away for absolutely no return. not something i would advise a new player to do. the only concievable time it makes sense to use free housing is on a very communist themed island with nothing but very low level housing, which minimises the financial loss whilst maximising the happiness gain.

[Fly]

The problem is not people losing happiness for paying rent, the problem is that students, unemployed and retired people can possibly not even afford that one buck you might ask for tenements. They CANNOT move into the houses you provide and thus have to live in shacks.

The problem shacks present are by some margin and then some worse than the pennies you lose from them not paying rent. The money in this game isn't in your population, it's in foreign trade and toursm. Quite frankly, I don't even notice the "loss" of rent income in my wallet. And it's obvious why:

Let's pretend we get 5 bucks per person and month rent. Which is already insane considering that 5 bucks per month is the standard payment for unskilled labor. That's 60 bucks per person and year. Say you have 100 people on your island, that's a loss of 6,000 bucks a year.

And if that amount is even worth mentioning, you have far worse problems than rent at your hands.

And for those pennies you risk shacks, which increases crime (makes capitalists unhappy), increase pollution (makes environmentalists unhappy) and they themselves make the commies unhappy too. And these are especially nasty since police stations and garbage dumps don't really change that.

[Mike]

social security gives students and retirees the money they need. its one of the universally best edicts and should be on at all times - because it actually provides a sizeable happiness gain for the pittance you pay for it. the unemployed live in shanties which dont create half as much crime as lowly shacks. getting back one third of all the wages you pay on the entire island is not *pennies*. the money lost isnt going to make or break the economy, but free housing still gives it away for nothing.

the best possible housing situation is having all varieties of housing available, the right people of the right social class living in the right housing, and all of it providing you profit. everybody wins.

free housing is an edict like martial law, for very specific islands. your average capitalist paradise has no place for such a thing. it's also good if you just cant be bothered messing around with wages and rents.

[Artur]

Tropicans like to have highest wage in Caribbean.
So, I'm agree with last comment.
High average wage, social security and fair price for everything (including housing ) will make your people happy and won't put a huge pressure on your economy.
Also your capitalists will be happy, therefore you'll have good relationship with USA, wich will boost your tourism rating
Free housing - wasting of money. I using it only when I making my people work for free)

[Mike]

im a tight fisted git when it comes to wages too, i dont care about the caribbean average wage lol i set the wages at 6, 12 and 21 and they never budge the whole game. maybe a tiny boost at election time that i quickly take back afterwards ;)