Re: Not enough residents
@yazooblue wrote:Hello, friends. I continually get this message that there aren't enough residents to work in my businesses and factories. Some factories even close down because of it. And yet I have lots and lots of residents in the green zones. More than anything else. I don't get it.
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Well, this one is almost impossible for someone else to answer. It's kind of what the game is about, figuring out the right balance of RCI, keeping everyone happy, making money, etc. Here are a couple of things to look at to figure out the problem:
You probably have a huge demand for low wealth workers via industry and commercial, with residential areas populated with medium or high wealth people. Take a look at your population details tab - check the demand for each wealth class vs. the population of workers. You're good if you can keep the unfilled jobs per wealth at half or less than the available jobs. So if you have 1000 low wealth jobs available, aim for at least 500 of them to be filled.
If you have all your low wealth residential workers in low or medium density, upgrade the roads to get high density residential buildings and pack in some more workers. If you have a bunch of medium wealth residential, consider lowering the wealth level - remove parks and city buildings that are increasing the wealth level, demolish the higher wealth level buildings and get some good old low wealth factory workers to move in.
When you get messages about "not enough workers", think also that this can be interpreted as "too many jobs available". Maybe you just have too many commercial and industrial zones. Try rezoning some of that into residential.
If your wealth classes match your job needs (if the population details say you have enough workers for each class), but they're not getting to the factories for some reason, then it's more than likely a traffic issue. Watch closely at shift changes; do you have traffic jams all over the city? If the worker Sims can't reach a job in about two hours, they just wander around and then find a house to go back to and complain. Traffic is hard in SimCity - and the sim agents do not have a memory. They just wander around filling in jobs and shopping at the first place they can find, and "go home" to the first place they can find. Try not to have 4 way intersections; 3 way intersections are the best - and building commercial interspersed in your residential areas will help a lot because the sims will walk to work and shopping, freeing the roads.
Another possibility is to build an arcology great works, but be aware that this increases your regional traffic a lot! They all drive in from the arcology and leave by driving, so if your traffic is not running smoothly you'll end up with tons of traffic backed up, blocking deliveries from the region and generally making your life miserable.
I hope this helps you figure it out.
