I'm finally good at a Sim City game. I had Sim City 3000 way back in the day but I always stalled out (at best) around 25,000 citizens. The last game I started the other day in Sim City DS similarly stalled under 20,000 and I could not seem to get the city to grow. I ended up looking up a guide on city planning in this edition and it turns out I was building far too many roads and not placing amenities correctly. Armed with a template for a 'proper' city layout, I started a new game. After building the first two city blocks I unpaused the game and my population immediately shot up over 10,000! It has been a wild ride for sure.
After the initial blocks were built, I began expanding the city block by block until I ran into a problem - sprawl had pushed my city into the industrial zone. The industrial zone was initially set up a long ways away from the city center but eventually the city began to overtake it. I had a plan to relocate the industrial zone to the fringes of the map (where ~half of the pollution would disappear into the outside world) and then build more residential blocks in the reclaimed industrial land. The theory behind this was fine but the execution was botched in the extreme.
I built too aggressively into the decommissioned industrial zone and wound up with some seriously polluted districts. At first, the rollout of the new city blocks went great as there was a lot of pent up housing demand. At first unpausing, there was a massive amount of housing starts and my population jumped from 75,000 to over 80,000. However, as soon as the first new blocks were finished, housing density collapsed as people realized the new neighborhoods were trashy. I dropped below 75,000 people within a couple of months and urban flight took hold and neighboring districts also thinned out.
The pollution problem got so bad that I spawned a giant mutant gorilla that I had to use the defense forces to take down. He spawned three times and while the damage he created was minimal foot-print wise, he took down a lot of expensive amenities that exacerbated the urban flight problem. As if that wasn't enough, I had three back-to-back earthquakes that disrupted traffic patterns and took down some more high rises.
At this point, I was desperate to control the problem. I planted a ton of trees around the industrial zone and ripped out more industrial spaces, water towers and power plants in a desperate bid to fight pollution. Ripping out the buildings also afforded me a chance to fix my transportation grid with more efficient routing out to the new industrial zone on the edge of the map. Tearing up industrial spaces caused a small population crash as people lost their jobs but the population quickly bounced back through the opening of even more industrial zones on the city outskirts.
The population hovered around 80,000 for about ten years as all of this played out and I saved up money. When I finally had a decent nest egg, I put in two new housing tracts with lots of amenities in a new area on the periphery of the old city core. This goosed the population over 80,000 finally and also pushed demand to fill out the last few undeveloped commercial, industrial and residential districts around the city. With things under control, I put in two new housing districts and made sure to load them with amenities.
This was a turning point for the city and the population jumped to over 100,000. Once that threshold was reached, I was able to lower taxes with attracted another 30,000 residents. I've been letting the game run as I type this to build up enough funds to gut the last remnants of the old industrial core and reclaim all of that space once and for all. My city currently occupies about half the map which is definitely a first for me.
Sorry for the long write up, I'm having a blast.
You and You're the best !!!! 
