High vs Low Density Residential?

[isansom]

Hey all,

Been playing this brilliant game for a fair number of hours now, city is ~35k, things are good.

My city is situated on a peninsular, and I wanted it all high rise so I replaced all the low density res / com with high. Worked pretty well, except that my residential won't fill up fully - there always seems to be about 2-3k households still available. While that would be ok, I also have 2-3k open jobs (varies). Shouldn't the demand for labour bring in the population?

The RCI meter shows little to no demand for residential, and high for commerce / industry, but if I add new jobs they just don't have enough workers, and my high density residential remains at the 80%ish level it's been for YEARS now.

Oddly, if I add low density residential, it gets filled instantly.

So what I'm seeing here is: RCI doesn't show proper demand levels - as a whole, there's plenty of residential, but they specifically want low and not high density homes.

Anyone else seen this happen? The tooltip does talk about different people wanting the different zone densities, but there didn't seem to be any hard information on it so I have previously assumed it's fluff. Clarification / more info would be great. Is this true for commerce too?

 

[Setari]

I always thought high density was just for packing more people into smaller spaces. That way you make more money per building or per area square. However the tooltip does say that high density does attract young people, so maybe that has something to do with it, but I'm not sure tbh.

 

[JetCity Gambler]

I think the high-density housing tends to appeal to educated and young people, who are more likely to work in offices or high-density commercial. For your factories, you still need Joe Lunchpail from the suburbs.

I did the same thing, upgraded nearly everything to high-density residential, but my factories started crashing left and right with abandoned buildings. I build a couple suburbs of low-density out near the freeway, they filled up immediately and it seemed to fix my factory labor problem.

 

[Bautz]

@JetCity Gambler: This should be more about the education Level. However, a mix between low and high densitiy Looks much nicer. But i'm still missing "medium", since there is allways a "break" from 100 floors to 1 floor.

 

[cagca]

I just posted a similar question hoping Colossal will answer. I have 32k citizens and according to my district populations 8k of this 32k is low density residential. A good mix I think. Yet my high rises don't fill to capacity despite a large need for workers. I'm a slow city builder player relying heavily on the info panels for future city progression...having trouble figuring this one out. Unless there is a built in vacancy % factor.

 

[Mithkabob]

High Density housing creates requests for single people and low density creates requests for families to move into them.

 

[isansom]

High Density housing creates requests for single people and low density creates requests for families to move into them.

How do you KNOW this? Seems to be true, but where is this shown? The assumption also seems to be that there is some kind of limit on ratios of family vs single, shown by the high density buildings not filling, but jobs still being there.

 

[mwyeoh]

How do you KNOW this? Seems to be true, but where is this shown? The assumption also seems to be that there is some kind of limit on ratios of family vs single, shown by the high density buildings not filling, but jobs still being there.

It is shown on the tooltip when you hover over low/high density residential

 

[magitsu]

It is shown on the tooltip when you hover over low/high density residential

It was also mentioned in one of the pre-release developer streams (the one in finnish featuring co_karoliina).
She used it to illustrate that you need to provide schools on average much earlier for the low density residential area (because families with kids are drawn in) whereas the needs are skewed slightly differently for a singles dominated area.