How to increase demand for residential zones?

Zones are an integral part of Cities Skylines, giving you the possibility of where to build your houses for residents, shops for customers and factories for workers. There are five different zone types and among them is the one we are interested in today – the residential zone. As with all zones in Cities Skylines, problems can occur with the residential zone too. How do you fix no demand for residential zones? Why does it occur and how to increase it once it is fixed? Let’s take a look at it in this article!

How to increase the demand for residential zones?

To increase the demand for residential zones, you need to place some services. As I mentioned above, your residents have specific needs, and just like in real life, they need things like police stations, fire stations, hospitals, and good transportation like buses, metro and trains. They also need a nice environment, which can be provided by parks between buildings, etc. It is not always about industry and offices.

How to fix no residential demand in Cities Skylines?

Imagine this situation: you have an excess of commercial zones and there are more commercial zones than the city really needs. Your residents do not enter all shops as they have too many of them and it leads to low or even no demand for commercial zones. On the other side, industrial zones are extremely busy producing a massive quantity of goods. Moreover, to produce these goods they need to have a huge amount of materials. In this case, the RCI is unbalanced.

The first option is to avoid this situation in the first place and so leave commercial demand at 50%.

The second option is to find out which RCI you have overbuilt and bring it down into balance with other zones. This can be done by focusing on the other two zones, and once they are in balance, focus on all three at the same time.

Why this problem appears?

Just like in real life, your residents will express their needs after some time. Simply put, they have to work somewhere, earn money from that and then spend the money. This means that all the zones are connected and it’s up to the industrial and commercial zones whether your residents have everything they need or not.

As I wanted to show you, the balance of the RCI zones is crucial. If the RCI zones are unbalanced, it is like a chain reaction. The main cause of this imbalance is the excessive construction of commercial zones to satisfy unnecessary high commercial demand. In the case of the residential zones, there may be no demand for them and so there may be no workers for the factories and so on.

What does the RCI mean? RCI is a special term for residential-commercial-industrial zones. They form the basic trio of lower bars in the main game panel: residential (green), commercial (dark blue), industrial (yellow).
RCI bars in Cities Skylines

Other zones

The other four zones are:

  • Commercial zone (dark blue) – It provides shops and other services by selling goods. These goods are produced in the industrial zones or imported from somewhere else.
  • Industrial zone (yellow) – It provides jobs for workers and products for commercial buildings.
  • Office (light blue) – It provides jobs for your educated citizens. It counts as industry but it doesn’t produce any goods.
  • Municipal zone – This type is a special “zone” and it cannot be found in the zoning menu (as the other four others). It is typical for buildings which are owned by government (police station, fire station, hospitals).

Tips to solve problems in Cities Skylines

Hardest problems guides not enough customers and not enough goods to sell

Complicated problems could be also with overeducated workers which cause abandoned buildings

How to make money in Cities Skylines and how to get out of debt quickly

Tips to increasing population and understanding how increase residential demand

What is land value and why you need to focus to get happy citizens

To play on bigger map you need unlock more tiles and inside I show how to use full maps

Also you should have problems with power outages and with traffic with which we could also help

Tereza
I’m Teresa, one of the content creators and a translator. My favourites are art, literature and video games. My goal is to bring some freshness and sensitivity to the articles.