Cities Skylines Photo Diary

[Young Drachma]

This is the latest neighborhood map. Some renaming, some expansion though I haven't done much outside of the city limits yet.

[Young Drachma]

Extremely likely that I'm going to attempt rebuilding the subway lines the same way I did for buses. I feel like there are 1) too many stops and 2) I just want to know the areas better and doing this has helped me understand where things are, etc.

The problem with the subway right now is I don't really know where the connection points are and I'd like to have a better sense of where they drop off, intersect, etc. Now that I know the neighborhoods and have the lines identified, this should be easier (in theory) and then I figure out bus efficiency, but I'm probably doing something really wrong with the buses.

After reading what other people have done/are doing, they've gotten a lot more ridership than I've managed to...the best I can seem to do is about 5-6%, I've read people who have 13% ridership because their lines are more efficient or at least, more common to get people where they need to go. It'll be tedious to start over again, but seeing as this is literally the only thing I'm working on right now in the city, I'm good with it.

[Young Drachma]

For my current save, I'm only going to work on mass transit and perhaps, clarifying neighborhood boundaries. I don't think I'll do anything dramatic like eliminate TRAM system or anything. I'm not even entirely sure I'll change the way METRO service works right now. I haven't rebuild the METRO service, I only renamed them based on existing lines, because it seemed like a gargantuan task.

Buses themselves have been enough of a bear. I do think one of the "realistic" mods I had on was causing the drop in bus/subway traffic, because nothing else I did would've caused such a decline in ridership on subway lines. Bus lines I can see it, because I changed the lines so drastically and because none of my lines are really that circular around the city and I don't have routes that work in tandem with other ones.

I might rebuild the bus lines a third time, this time, I will look at commuting patterns of people in residential neighborhoods to find out where they work and see if it works better to get them from where they are to where they'd like to be.

Then I'll take some photos and share my work.

[Young Drachma]

I did a citywide census last night and was able to really section the city off into 5 separate boroughs, essentially. I haven't named them yet, but for organizational purposes, it makes things a lot easier to make sense of because two of them are extremely residential (South) and the Northeast is emergent, whereas Central and Northwest are more industrial/commercial focused.

Understanding the neighborhoods and how they arrange helps me understand traffic flow better.

[Young Drachma]

I started reading again over at Simtropolis. Apparently at around 400k population, the game hits an active agent limit. So my mass transit problems aren't really me, it's just a game constraint on how many simulated agents can be moving around at once.

That makes me feel better that it's not something I was doing wrong, per se.

[Young Drachma]

The Ironwood Redevelopment Project (IRP) was literally a campaign promise made by the incoming mayor and he delivered, as the project is still in Phase II, but Phase I is pretty impressive. Gone are the smokestacks that pushed up against downtown and were separated from it by a highway.

Instead? One of Helensburgh's hottest new neighborhoods. I can't wait to get more into this place and finish the project. It'll be almost entirely residential/commercial, not many offices here.

Ironwood is also home to the new Helensburgh Zoo and a minor league soccer stadium.





Here you can see the separation of what I'm roughly referring to right now as East Ironwood and West Ironwood. Both have their own "parkside" areas that were industrial areas. I'd imagine both will develop into separate neighborhoods, but I have not figure out what they'd be called yet. The Ironwood name has some currency still, but there is a need to differentiate which park you're referring to, rather than just the generic "Ironwood Park"



Another area that is developing is College Park home to Helensburgh University.

[Young Drachma]

Umm..sidenote? Using dynamic resolution mod to generate "HD" screenshots of my cities. The Simtropolis folks were doing it and I had no idea how their screenshots looked so much better. First, it's because many of those folks place their cities assets by hand. But it's also because they use dynamic resolution to generate super high res images.

I don't play with that resolution, just crank it to take photos.

[Balldog]

Impressive
I wish I could get into this game but I flame out early on every time


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Young Drachma]

My latest shots were taken last night in the College Park section of Helensburgh. I've been on a spree lately of redevelopment around the city, but it's a huge city so there's always lots of work to do. I need to go through tonight and take a bunch of screenshots of the various neighborhoods and get some detail shots, just so that I have some before & after shots to show you all after I get done making changes.

[Young Drachma]

No idea what part of town this is because it's at night.

[Young Drachma]

This is from the Heart River section of Helensburgh. The area is outside the city limits, near Heart River and a relatively new development that only cropped up in recent years. Very residential and in contrast to say, Milwaukie/Woodland Park area, feels more urban and less suburban, but still super quiet and great for families.

[Young Drachma]

Planning to spend a bit of time today in Helensburgh, I've found some new areas I'd like to redevelop or at least get a better sense of where they are. The skyline of the downtown is also evolving. It's essentially a citywide plan to become less dense/congested, so the city is evolving before our eyes.

Here's a view of the red light district called "Playhouse" to get you going.

The Playhouse District is the Red Light district in the city.

[Young Drachma]

I decided to redo the district map. Rather than codifying the district each time I want to repurpose an area, I'm just going to create boroughs of the city. I feel like it'll make it easier to determine the character of each area, rather than thinking in such a micro way.

I'll still identify neighborhoods, it'll just be a manual thing. When the street naming mod starts working again, I can use street names to help me figure out boundaries of neighborhoods since in many cities the boundaries aren't precise anyway.

[Young Drachma]

Went touring. More context for these later, I just needed to share the latest.

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Playhouse District, Helensburgh


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[Young Drachma]

[/url]255710_20170101231741_1

[Young Drachma]

Downtown isn't in the corner as the map indicates. There's a bug sometimes when you rename regions and it pushes the old region names into the corner of the map. It's weird. Anyway...what I've done here is create 5 boroughs from the existing land masses where we once had neighborhoods. They still exist, I just needed a better -- more organized -- way to figure out how the parts of the city interact, partially because it helps me better formulate and shape the neighborhoods.



Ameliaville is not a borough. It's a separate city not part of Helensburgh, but is obviously part of the metropolitan area. I'll be building other cities outside of the city limits over time, too.

More later.

[Young Drachma]

What I've done here is create 5 boroughs from the existing land masses where we once had neighborhoods. They still exist, I just needed a better -- more organized -- way to figure out how the parts of the city interact, partially because it helps me better formulate and shape the neighborhoods. Most will still exist, but I'd prefer more flexible and porous borders anyway, whereas the boroughs do not change. Ameliaville is a city that's outside of Helensburgh, but would be considered part of the metropolitan area. I imagine we'll have more of those towns over time, too.

So future images will explore the neighborhoods of each in more detail. Our districts/boroughs are hereafter referred to as "Charters"

NEIGHBORHOODS BY CHARTER (PART OF CITY)

PILLSBROOK (SE HELENSBURGH)
South Side Cove
Uptown
North Laurel
Merchant
Heirloom
Far Side
Bay Slope
Forest Heights
South Commerce
Lower West End
Sheffield Square

STOBBEN*(S/SW HELENSBURGH)
Spring Lake Park
Crown Point
Playhouse District
The Bottlecap
Pleasant Island
Shippen Point
Upper Rigby
Lower Rigby
Central Slope
Bayside-Market
SoDo

MESSIER*(CENTRAL HELENSBURGH)
Downtown
Messier
Ironwood
Eastwood Park
West Side Square
Brewerstown
West Side
Lower North
Midtown Park
Silkwood

CHAUNCEYSTHROW (NNW HELENSBURGH)
North End
Bridgewater
Kidney
Congotown
Circle City
Way North
Dreamland

THE DAUPHIN*(NNE HELENSBURGH)
Milwaukie
Woodland*
North Woodland
Highland Estates
Prime Minister Island
Cantaloupe Creek
East Island
College Park
Airport (HBG)

OUTSIDE CITY LIMITS
Ameliaville

[Young Drachma]

Some factoids:

• Nobody who lives in "Messier" says they live in Messier, they'll just tell you the neighborhood or even the street number they're on.

• It's not Chaunceysthrow to anyone local, just "I live in Chauncey."

• Chauncey is trying to fashion itself as the new hotness, but a lot of folks feel it's just too far from the city center.

• People who live on East Island are legally in The Dauphin, but really feel more aligned with Messier given its proximity and because it's kind of a intermediate point to the other charters since they have bridges going on both side. So anyone who lives in College Park, East Island neighborhood or near the Airport are likely to rep EIC (East Island City, not a real place..but the nickname for the whole island) than The Dauphin, which has a reputation for being a sleepy place and a bit ritzy depending on your neighborhood.

• The rest of The Dauphin are also pretty neighborhood dependent and are always likely to mention what neighborhood they live in, so you know they're not in the urban core and you might presume they're rich somehow even though that's not the majority of the people who live there.

• Stobben is pronounce STOUGH-BEN, not STAH-BEN.

• Pillsbrook is the most suburban of the charters, people here would probably say "Uptown Pillsbrook or Heirloom Pillsbrook, but usually
  "neighborhood/Pillsbrook." They're pretty proud of themselves down there.*

• Stobben is where everybody moves when they can't afford Messier. Home to the red-light district and the new baseball stadium, it's probably where the most young people live outside of College Park.

[Young Drachma]

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Wrourough is the 6th Charter. It's pronounced "Rural"

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[Young Drachma]

Did some building in the Milwaukie area today, built a new university that has fantastic views, too.

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[Young Drachma]

My most recent visit to town was building a winter resort outside of the city limits called Walter Mountain Resort. The town itself is called Walter and it's grown from a skibum resort town with a metro area population of about 25,000 people tho it's less during the off-season. We built a smaller airport at the base of the mountain, largely to accommodate tourist traffic who are rich people that wanted to come in just for skiing and didn't want to deal with larger HBG (Helensburgh International). This smaller airport we'll say is actually older than HBG, but was pressed into action as Walter Mountain became a destination winter vacation spot.

Here are some pics:

[Young Drachma]

I expanded past the Ameliaville area and created a new town of Heart Lake, which is right on Heart Lake this time rather than relatively adjacent.

It's recently added highway access, so it'll probably start to get bigger faster as a result.

Here are some photos of Heart Lake:

[/url][url=https://flic.kr/p/PV4tjd]







Across the highway is the town of Middledock, which is actually a city separated by an inlet, no good photos of it yet.

[Young Drachma]

I read this story in the NYT today and it made me think about these cities and how we can tell better stories. I might even make a Medium collection out of it, since I have such good photos.

I'm kicking around doing features on various neighborhoods and some of the challenges they face. It's interesting when we build these, we spend a lot of time talking about the challenges with redevelopment and not really focusing as much on the "agents" that are contained on the ground, where they go, what they do and so forth.

Even when there are people who build more slum-riddled cities, there just lacks a bunch of context. For instance, I'm thinking about the ways that mass transit works in the city and what life is like in the parts of the city proper that don't have any mass transit access and how expensive it is to live there, etc.

So I'm going to probably do some contextualizing as I go through and keep building or whatever.

I also need, now that I have a better sense of the areas of town, to look at the mass transit maps and do some visual routing of where bus/subway lines go on a photo of the city. With the street naming mod still not working, I can't name streets easily, but I might use some other method to try again, because it's the one thing I haven't been able to do as much lately so I don't have context for the neighborhoods in a granular way.

I'd like to dig deeper for stories.

[Young Drachma]

When I first started redeveloping here, I was thinking it was more Denver-esque, but now I'm thinking it's way more like Atlanta especially as it grows.

The thing we're probably missing is a third principal city, assuming that Ameliaville is a full fledged city, so we'll work on building a second major city somewhere, but I haven't decided where yet. Plus, I get a bit hamstrung when it comes to building some of these places because I tend to make the road networks a bit too sprawled and I'd prefer tighter ones if I can manage it.

[Young Drachma]

I finally got Cimtopgrapher to work for me so I was able to start generating road maps of the city. This is a street map of the Pillsbrook section of the city.

[/url]

[Young Drachma]

The road naming mod is broken in-game. I could probably generate roads using the the cimtopgrapher tool, but I feel like it's more organic to do it in-game because I can see which ways roads connect and get a more natural feel. Since the road tool is broken, I'll probably just use the district tool as a stopgap. It'll be messy and I sort of hate it, but...I've got screenshots of the neighborhood map and I didn't intend to go back to using the district namer that way anyway.

I'd like to rebuild mass transit situations again, I feel like ridership isn't really effective because i've done a crap job of connecting neighborhoods to transit, etc., but in order for me to be better at this, I need to have a sense of the names of streets and stations so that I know precisely where I'm connecting people, etc.

I could probably spend some time looking at the commuting patterns of people, but I'm not sure I'm that invested this is really too nerdy for words.

[Young Drachma]

I'm kind of at a standstill until I can name roads, which is kinda dumb but that's just what I want to work on right now. I did rebuild the bus lines, but I had to disable some mods that I think were preventing the lines from actually starting to work. If not, I'll delete the lines and eventually start again.

It's also possible that we can just ditch bus transit altogether in this city for now and just have gnarly traffic for a while if it leads to that and then eventually try to rework the bus situation once I can effectively map roads better.

The real problem with bus lines is a lot of the neighborhoods are very winding and it makes it hard to create linear routes throughout the area to me. I'm just also really loathe to create lots of small lines that feed into bigger ones because I might find it tedious or perhaps I'd like to be sure it's working first before going further.

So I dunno, I'll test what I've done now and see if it takes without mods loaded and if not, I'll need to try again a different way.

Sidenote: For the purposes of my basketball sims I'm playing right now, Helensburgh/Ameliaville is going to be a major city based in Montana. It's more realistic than when I try to stage things out of Wyoming and there are at least two D1 basketball programs there, so I'll be intrigued that if we ratchet up the talent out of Montana over time whether those programs will benefit or not.

It won't even just be talent from our area, but from other cities around the state.

I won't really be editing ratings because that's way too tedious in FBCB, I'm just going to rename guys and move game-generated guys to Montana essentially and then see how the game reacts to this talent infusion into that state over the years.

I might eventually put an NBA expansion team there too, because I have a spot for them and I think the story is leading me in that direction.

I need a census of all of the high schools in the city first, so that's my next project since I can actually do that.

The MSA population (agents converted to people) is over 4.3 million, making Ameliaville-Helensburgh, MT MSA the 13th largest MSA in the country sandwiched between Riverside and Detroit if you look at the current numbers. It's nearing the Phoenix/Atlanta comparisons of sprawling city and has surpassed Denver as the 2nd largest city in the Mountain West after Phoenix. If you're trying to map your way there, for the purposes of this storyline, just use Haxby, MT because the only water situation that resembles the map I have in any real way in Montana would be just there near the Missouri River, which I'm good with it being a river city.

[Young Drachma]

SUBURBS
----
Helensburgh Central
Heartlake
Northwest (Middledock)
Walter Mountain

CHAUNCEY
----
Circle City
Chauncey
Bridgewater
Kidneytown
Academy of Arts & Science

MESSIER
----
North Side (Far North)
Brewer
Skyline
Chippewa
Ameliaville Christian
St. John The Baptist Catholic
Ironwood
West Side
Green Meadows School
Messier North
East Side

THE DAUPHIN
------
Frozen Lake
Parker School
City Island
Pope John Paul II
Highland North
Highland South
Milwaukie Catholic
Milwaukie East
Milwaukie West
Woodland North
Woodland Creek


PILLSBROOK
----
Helensburgh Episcopal
Southeast
Heirloom
Bay Slope
Pillsbrook East
Pillsbrook South
Forest Heights
South Commerce
Sheffield
Laurel
Uptown
Pillsbrook North
Pillsbrook West
Creek Ridge
Bear Mountain

WROUROUGH
---
South Ameliaville
Ameliaville School For The Deaf

STOBBEN
----
Twin Islands
Shippen South
Shippen North
Crown Point
Bayside
Central Slope
Holy Father
Community Hall
Stobben Central
Urusline Academy

[Young Drachma]

In this parallel universe of sorts, I'd imagine that Ameliaville MSA would be much like NYC and would have its own city championships and then the winner of that association would go on and play in the regular MHSA state tournament.

Because right now, the biggest high school in Montana doesn't have 2,000 students. I do not recall the biggest high school in our area, but there are a number of HS with over 1,000 students and something like over 90,000 HS students citywise at last check, so I can imagine how playing those schools in a state tournament would seem unfair over time.

Plus travel is kind of a mess anyway.

If you ever read this and want to pick a high school to be good, you can and I'll make sure more recruits come from there over that period. Like I said, I'm not really editing anybody, just change names and high schools during the early period before recruiting really gets going. Creating recruits for the game is way too tedious and I've done it in the past. Some states generate a surplus of 1-star recruits which makes it a bit easier to fill Montana with those kids, with the occasional good player from a state with lots of them. "Imagine families moving to Ameliaville to get more scholarship looks than staying in a bloated state."

[Brian Swartz]

The amount of effort you put into layout, organization, etc. here is beyond astounding.

I declare this thread to have surpassed the dynasty stage, and have become a full-blown work of art!

[Young Drachma]

Originally Posted by Brian Swartz

The amount of effort you put into layout, organization, etc. here is beyond astounding.

I declare this thread to have surpassed the dynasty stage, and have become a full-blown work of art!

I always appreciate that you notice, haha. So much dorktasticness.

[bbgunn]

I concur.

[EagleFan]

Originally Posted by Brian Swartz

The amount of effort you put into layout, organization, etc. here is beyond astounding.

I declare this thread to have surpassed the dynasty stage, and have become a full-blown work of art!

This.

[Young Drachma]

Road name got fixed. I'll likely be naming streets until I fall asleep.

[Young Drachma]

There aren't many industrial areas left in town, by my design, but the last one is called Silkwood. It's adjacent to Far North, the furthest point of Messier, wedged between Prime Minister Island (where no one lives) and the northeast of the city (The Dauphin/Milwaukie/Highland Estates) and to its west, we have Chauncey which is way more residential.

For now, the area endures as the lone industrial part of the city, but will it last?

[Young Drachma]

Here's a current view of the downtown area (Messier)

[Young Drachma]

I am a sucker for a downtown ballpark. I finally got a downtown (well South of Downtown) where I could nestle one into.

[Young Drachma]

Downtown Pillsbrook




Aerial view of Pillsbrook, it's got a very "Queens" vibe if you wanna speak NYC parlance.

[EagleFan]

Haven't played this in a while. This thread makes me want to fire it back up. Awaiting the unavoidable disappointment that I won't end up making anything that looks that nice. :-)

[Young Drachma]

Originally Posted by EagleFan

Haven't played this in a while. This thread makes me want to fire it back up. Awaiting the unavoidable disappointment that I won't end up making anything that looks that nice. :-)

Haha, I'd suggest hitting up the Steam Workshop and finding someone else's city already built and then tweaking it in your own image. I find that is harder than doing it from scratch and you spend less time building pipes and roads and more time growing or redeveloping your city.

[Young Drachma]

The bus thing is giving me a headache, but I really want to solve this now that I can name streets/roads.

So my new redevelopment mass transit idea is focused on the METRO and bus system.

I'm going to rely fairly heavily on metro transit around the city, since that system is pretty mature and there's a decent amount of ridership. I'm going to change the bus setup to work only on major roads OR only to serve neighborhoods. So no more buses that traverse from different parts of the city, though I'll probably keep lines that go between different bus depots too.

I just need to do this in a logical way for my brain, without having to lay a ton of bus stops around the city that probably won't get used because it's clearly not working as I've got it now.

So off to attempt this, which is likely to lead to some kind of new naming/numbering system for bus/METRO in the city.

The crux of this deal is that I'd like to be able to know how to get from one part of town to another. I've only now begun to really get a sense of where the neighborhoods are and what part of town is what. But I still don't have a sense via roads and certainly not mass transit how you'd do that. Before I do ANYMORE building or development, I'd like to put this into action and then I can start figuring out what to do next.

I got the growth I wanted in spades, but I still don't have a handle on transportation besides driving which works well.

[Young Drachma]

I rebuilt the lines last night. We've got over 40 bus lines now, the METRO lines are at around 21, but I'm increasing that number too and I'll add more neighborhood bus lines over the city as we move on, but after rebuilding the lines last night, I let the game run 6 hours on its own to make sure the lines would repopulate, etc., and so far, bus ridership is up significantly from any other time in this city.



Bus ridership actually outpaces METRO ridership right now, but I need to rework the subways to get them working how they were when we first took over the city. There might be some overlapping lines, but essentially, I'd like to have lines heading in both directions N/S or E/W.

[Young Drachma]

I'm going to go back and replicate the lines I had on the previous page, as those lines were almost all North to South or East to West lines. I think they'll probably operate as express lines rather than how I had them before, if I could create 4 or 5 express lines that basically converge all in the middle of the city -- there isn't a major subway depot in the middle of the city, just a train one -- I bet that would work in tandem with the smaller lines I have working.

There are probably some tweaks needed to my existing lines, too. But I think I can get ridership back up into tens of thousands per day on subways, even with the uptick in bus traffic, largely because the population of the city has grown (again).

The most interesting thing is that the lack of subways has gotten people to start using the tram system more. It's not ubiquitous across the city, it's mostly a Central Messier and Downtown and maybe SoDo (I don't recall) thing but we've never had that much ridership on the trams ever. So that's been cool because I haven't touched those lines at all and don't intend to.

[Young Drachma]

From today's visit to town. Shots from Downtown/Ironwood area including the downtown transit terminal. One shot from Stobben. More detail later tho.

255710_20170118232202_1 by Roni Somerkoski, on Flickr

255710_20170118232139_1 by Roni Somerkoski, on Flickr

255710_20170118232106_1 by Roni Somerkoski, on Flickr

255710_20170118232048_1 by Roni Somerkoski, on Flickr

255710_20170118231943_1 by Roni Somerkoski, on Flickr

[Young Drachma]

The bus situation has improved a lot, we have more lines and I bet I could make them more efficient, but I'm not going to worry about that now.

I decided I didn't like the subway lines I'd laid, so I went through and removed them and I'm going to try again. It would be easier in a sense if I could relay the subway tubes from scratch, but that's just work I'm not willing to untake plus it feels more realistic to work around the constraints.

I noticed when I did this the last time, the lines that had a lot of stops seemed to do better. This time, I found that cross-town lines work better than just having regional lines that force you to do a transfer. So I think what I'll do is have lines that effectively go east/west & north/south. They'll just intersect at the center of the city and I'll see if that works.

[Young Drachma]

I've significantly improved the transit situation on my third try. The key is you need long lines that stretch N/S or E/W from one part of town clear to the other with stops in-between, rather than thinking people will take more than one line to get where they want to go.

They'll transfer, but they'd just prefer a line that takes them out of their neighborhood or else, they'd just opt to drive. I mean, that makes sense but I couldn't get myself out of the habit of making lines that didn't make sense or there weren't enough lines going places to make it worth waiting for a train because the times were too long.

I still probably need to add more lines, but we're at 20 lines right now and I have more ridership than I had when I had 25. We're not at the over 19k that we had when I first inherited the city, but I am making progress towards getting back into the 10k range which is/was my goal.

In other news, there's a huge traffic snarl over in the Circle City area where Helensburgh traffic enters the city.

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[Young Drachma]

Monument Square


Aerial view of Monument Square


View of the Pillsbrook Shore



Pillsbrook Boulevard, Pillsbrook

[Young Drachma]

I might, for the sake of not having people sift through three pages, fork this dynasty into a deal where I profile the specific neighborhoods in Helensburgh MSA. I've gone through and redetailed the map of the various areas, though there are still others that have yet to be named/developed, we've got a solid set to work from. I'd like to show more detail about the various neighborhoods, even if they're not especially distinctive (detail work not being my forte) at least we can see some pics of the various spaces and let whatever is there tell some kind of story.

I think I'm done dealing with subway lines, mostly because I think at the size of the city being where it is, the game has a harder time dealing with the numbers and I think it's just generally buggy or whatever and at the end of the day, none of it really matters all that much.

There's a possibility I'll do a thing where I try to identify where a recruit for FBCB is from or whatever, but no promises.

[Young Drachma]

This game is too engrossing so I tend to have to avoid it, but I've been wanting to get back into my cities and at least show you what I'd been working on the last time I had any real time to work on it, because there are some new neighborhoods and independent cities in the area that I haven't recorded here.

I've probably redone the subway and bus lines at least once or twice since the last time I posted in here, too. I have no idea whether it's working or not, but I'm kind of over it now until they release the new mass transit DLC and then I'll be able to work on it again, because there are just fundamental problems with the way it's setup so I'm not even going to worry about accuracy anymore at this point in this particular city.

The most notable new addition to the city -- and I'm not even sure if it's part of the city at all -- is San Felipe. There are (adjusted) about 54k people living in the community. With subway access, it makes for basically living in Hoboken or somewhere in Jersey when you can't afford to live in NYC. It's still a bit sleepy, but it's getting more interesting as time goes on.




Here's a map where you can see the far north parts of Helensburgh MSA and then San Felipe on its own in the far north peninsula of the map with University Heights/Milwaukie to the east, which also contains the only bridge/driving access to the main parts of the city. Otherwise, there's only subway access.

Average rents in San Felipe for a 700 sq. ft. apartment is $1,054mo. Contrasted by the city average rent of $2,715/mo., you can see why it's becoming an attractive place to live despite its sleepy reputation and distance from the main parts of the city.

[Young Drachma]

This is the view of downtown from San Felipe, it's in the distance there.