The *idea* behind how they set it up is a good one. Giving us the ability to fill empty houses or not, age the entire town or just our Sims or neither. But it obviously doesn't work right and needs tweaking. I just noticed last night that all the houses in my game were still empty (but there's tons of townies in my game's library that I see walking around town). I ended up turning on free real estate and putting some of those townies in houses. I also grabbed all the original pre-mades and some Sims 2 families Maxis added to the gallery and placed those.