You have lack of worker mostly, the game demand is based on employment rates, so make sure unemployment is well over 5% and maybe 20% in the early game. This makes sure you have enough workers.
Your lack of educated workers need priority. Your residential zones level up based on your education level. So, you should be plopping a lot of schools, so they can keep up. Since it takes many years to educate your cims, it can take a long time to get a fully educated workforce and get maximum residential building levels.
Also, your low demand for RCI bars are from you pre-zoning too much RCI. The game thinks the unbuilt areas that you zoned are already built. It is like reserving space. so it make the demand low. The problem with that, is low demand, means building grow slowly. so try to only zone several blocks at a time and wait for them to fill in, before zoning more. For example. 1 zone bar for residential will build only one resident at a time and slowly builds it. if you have full zone bars, then residential can build like 5 or more at once, plus build them faster.
But schools should be your priority on the first tile or two of your city. I buy my early game schools with milestone bonus money, Schools also educate cims so they commit less crime, use less water and less garbage waste, etc. So, schools can pay for themselves and even make profit in the long run. so keep that education machine rolling full force until you get a couple of universities and have at least 50% of your cims at the max education level (Highly Educated).
