Happy citizens abandoned buildings

[Melancholy-512]

(Gamepass player)
I'm so confused. https://imgur.com/a/Klc1ckq

2 neighborhoods. Both have schools, low noise pollution, parks, no air/ground/water pollution, close access to east/west highways, the east side actually has closer access to industry for work, they both have easy to access commercial zones, both have bus stops and a subway station is in the middle, they have dedicated post office, I've even built a police station/fire department/clinic to try and fix this, neither have any issues with traffic, there's a welfare office, no one is complaining about high rent, happiness is in the green for everyone, land value and building land value have no glaring difference.

On paper these are the same, and if anything the eastern neighborhood should almost be more desirable as it's closer in proximity to offices and industry. Yet, no matter how much I bulldoze people still keep abandoning the neighborhood.

What am I doing wrong?

[icedude94]

Would need to get a copy of the save file to figure it out. Can't tell much from just a screenshot of the city.

[ekin]

How much unemployment do you have?

[Melancholy-512]

Originally posted by icedude94:

Would need to get a copy of the save file to figure it out. Can't tell much from just a screenshot of the city.

Feel free to take a look: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PtMmsMCXiHHTgci2b-m3o9PCIFVz5SCz/view?usp=drive_link (Zip because I bundled the cid and the ♥♥♥. I don't know if you need both but just in case, but if you'd feel more comfortable if I hosted the 2 files separately please let me know.)

It was really just a sandbox test city for trying different layouts but this happened and absolutely stumped me.

[Scaristotle]

Depends on the situation, but sometimes people can be simply priced out of their homes by generating upgrades. It's just a part of the game, and base-game info simply isn't enough to determine this factor. Some people can afford to live comfortably alone in medium housing, paying for everything because they have so much money while others cannot. Land Value will not express this as even a red structure might just be some old rich guy living alone.

Chances are you are doing nothing wrong as it's a mechanic mostly hidden from the player. These kinds of things can be accessed with devmode or mods such as ExtendedTooltip. I personally chose to go the modded route, to each their own.

[icedude94]

Originally posted by Bruh-512:

Originally posted by icedude94:

Would need to get a copy of the save file to figure it out. Can't tell much from just a screenshot of the city.

Feel free to take a look: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PtMmsMCXiHHTgci2b-m3o9PCIFVz5SCz/view?usp=drive_link (Zip because I bundled the cid and the ♥♥♥. I don't know if you need both but just in case, but if you'd feel more comfortable if I hosted the 2 files separately please let me know.)

It was really just a sandbox test city for trying different layouts but this happened and absolutely stumped me.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3109129948

Fixed.

All your info pages and statistics pages regarding birth rates and stuff, I found you did have a period with a death wave where deaths were higher than births but it wasn't that major. One of your areas that had a lot of abandonment didn't have a healthcare facility close by so that might be the reason for that.

When cims are sick enough to need an ambulance, their health stat starts declining rapidly and they can die enroute to the hospital.

This wasn't the major contributor to why you have so much abandonment but it did factor into the problem. Single member households were dying from illness or old age and not being replaced.

The big contributor to the abandonment was you zoned too much high and medium density too fast AND you had placed a bunch of the late game high density residential signature buildings.

These were sucking in your population and were getting filled first over your low density residential.

I did a couple of things to fix it.

I deleted and dezoned all of your high density residential buildings. Then I demolished all of your residential signature buildings. This freed up THOUSANDS of households to seek new homes in your city. They quickly filled up all the empty medium density residential and then they went to fill up the low density.

They tried to build more high density residential in some zones that I missed so I had to demolish and de-zone those as well.

Now you did have a very high rate of immigration with about 5,500 new cims moving into your city each month. It's possible that your abandonment issues would have resolved itself in time, but you just simple had so much zoned with the higher densities plus all of the signature buildings that it would likely have taken a REALLY long time.

Remember, those signature buildings are EXTREMELY attractive. The residential ones will suck down all of your immigrants and kids will leave home and move into them as soon as they are old enough leaving their parents to grow into seniors and die alone.

Signature industry buildings do the same thing with pulling all of your educated workforce into them.

Demolishing the signature industry buildings even brought your industry demand back.

All of these buildings are, by default, supposed to only be able to be placed when you reach certain milestone requirements. Some of these buildings require like 200 level 5 high density residential buildings before unlocking.

By playing with everything unlocked, you placed them long before your city reached a natural population size and growth rate to keep them filled while maintaining positive RCI demand.

Now I can't confirm this, but I think that like commuters from outside the city filling empty jobs, there seems to be a soft cap on how many cims can move into your city per month. If you want to keep filled a large number of high density residential households, you need a high enough birth rate from low and medium density residential.

Having that many families is also how you keep enough kids and teens going through the education pipeline to keep all your high level industrial and office zones staffed to accommodate workers retiring.

[icedude94]

Like if you are trying to fill out your zones, you should not be placing buildings like this. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3109145049

[Melancholy-512]

Originally posted by icedude94:

Originally posted by Bruh-512:

Feel free to take a look: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PtMmsMCXiHHTgci2b-m3o9PCIFVz5SCz/view?usp=drive_link (Zip because I bundled the cid and the ♥♥♥. I don't know if you need both but just in case, but if you'd feel more comfortable if I hosted the 2 files separately please let me know.)

It was really just a sandbox test city for trying different layouts but this happened and absolutely stumped me.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3109129948

Fixed.

All your info pages and statistics pages regarding birth rates and stuff, I found you did have a period with a death wave where deaths were higher than births but it wasn't that major. One of your areas that had a lot of abandonment didn't have a healthcare facility close by so that might be the reason for that.

When cims are sick enough to need an ambulance, their health stat starts declining rapidly and they can die enroute to the hospital.

This wasn't the major contributor to why you have so much abandonment but it did factor into the problem. Single member households were dying from illness or old age and not being replaced.

The big contributor to the abandonment was you zoned too much high and medium density too fast AND you had placed a bunch of the late game high density residential signature buildings.

These were sucking in your population and were getting filled first over your low density residential.

I did a couple of things to fix it.

I deleted and dezoned all of your high density residential buildings. Then I demolished all of your residential signature buildings. This freed up THOUSANDS of households to seek new homes in your city. They quickly filled up all the empty medium density residential and then they went to fill up the low density.

They tried to build more high density residential in some zones that I missed so I had to demolish and de-zone those as well.

Now you did have a very high rate of immigration with about 5,500 new cims moving into your city each month. It's possible that your abandonment issues would have resolved itself in time, but you just simple had so much zoned with the higher densities plus all of the signature buildings that it would likely have taken a REALLY long time.

Remember, those signature buildings are EXTREMELY attractive. The residential ones will suck down all of your immigrants and kids will leave home and move into them as soon as they are old enough leaving their parents to grow into seniors and die alone.

Signature industry buildings do the same thing with pulling all of your educated workforce into them.

Demolishing the signature industry buildings even brought your industry demand back.

All of these buildings are, by default, supposed to only be able to be placed when you reach certain milestone requirements. Some of these buildings require like 200 level 5 high density residential buildings before unlocking.

By playing with everything unlocked, you placed them long before your city reached a natural population size and growth rate to keep them filled while maintaining positive RCI demand.

Now I can't confirm this, but I think that like commuters from outside the city filling empty jobs, there seems to be a soft cap on how many cims can move into your city per month. If you want to keep filled a large number of high density residential households, you need a high enough birth rate from low and medium density residential.

Having that many families is also how you keep enough kids and teens going through the education pipeline to keep all your high level industrial and office zones staffed to accommodate workers retiring.

Thank you very much for the detailed explanations and breakdowns. I honestly had a feeling it had something to do with me being in sandbox mode.

I see where I was going wrong now. I was trying to rush high density/offices by putting down the signature buildings so I could experiment with high density street layouts. I had been under the impression that signatures just gave buffs to nearby buildings and didn't realise they were such a vacuum. So my line of thinking was it would pull people to the downtown area but instead they were actually housing and taking up most of my population.

I'm going to take what you've explained and try to apply it ingame now. I feel as though this really cleared things up into how populations work ingame.

[icedude94]

Originally posted by Bruh-512:

Originally posted by icedude94:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3109129948

Fixed.

All your info pages and statistics pages regarding birth rates and stuff, I found you did have a period with a death wave where deaths were higher than births but it wasn't that major. One of your areas that had a lot of abandonment didn't have a healthcare facility close by so that might be the reason for that.

When cims are sick enough to need an ambulance, their health stat starts declining rapidly and they can die enroute to the hospital.

This wasn't the major contributor to why you have so much abandonment but it did factor into the problem. Single member households were dying from illness or old age and not being replaced.

The big contributor to the abandonment was you zoned too much high and medium density too fast AND you had placed a bunch of the late game high density residential signature buildings.

These were sucking in your population and were getting filled first over your low density residential.

I did a couple of things to fix it.

I deleted and dezoned all of your high density residential buildings. Then I demolished all of your residential signature buildings. This freed up THOUSANDS of households to seek new homes in your city. They quickly filled up all the empty medium density residential and then they went to fill up the low density.

They tried to build more high density residential in some zones that I missed so I had to demolish and de-zone those as well.

Now you did have a very high rate of immigration with about 5,500 new cims moving into your city each month. It's possible that your abandonment issues would have resolved itself in time, but you just simple had so much zoned with the higher densities plus all of the signature buildings that it would likely have taken a REALLY long time.

Remember, those signature buildings are EXTREMELY attractive. The residential ones will suck down all of your immigrants and kids will leave home and move into them as soon as they are old enough leaving their parents to grow into seniors and die alone.

Signature industry buildings do the same thing with pulling all of your educated workforce into them.

Demolishing the signature industry buildings even brought your industry demand back.

All of these buildings are, by default, supposed to only be able to be placed when you reach certain milestone requirements. Some of these buildings require like 200 level 5 high density residential buildings before unlocking.

By playing with everything unlocked, you placed them long before your city reached a natural population size and growth rate to keep them filled while maintaining positive RCI demand.

Now I can't confirm this, but I think that like commuters from outside the city filling empty jobs, there seems to be a soft cap on how many cims can move into your city per month. If you want to keep filled a large number of high density residential households, you need a high enough birth rate from low and medium density residential.

Having that many families is also how you keep enough kids and teens going through the education pipeline to keep all your high level industrial and office zones staffed to accommodate workers retiring.

Thank you very much for the detailed explanations and breakdowns. I honestly had a feeling it had something to do with me being in sandbox mode.

I see where I was going wrong now. I was trying to rush high density/offices by putting down the signature buildings so I could experiment with high density street layouts. I had been under the impression that signatures just gave buffs to nearby buildings and didn't realise they were such a vacuum. So my line of thinking was it would pull people to the downtown area but instead they were actually housing and taking up most of my population.

I'm going to take what you've explained and try to apply it ingame now. I feel as though this really cleared things up into how populations work ingame.

Happy to help!

One last thing, you have a sewage outflow pipe located next to your advanced water pumping station. You might want to get rid of that sewage outflow. Already I'm seeing every citizen in the city starting to complain about polluted water.