From How to Get Rid of Homeless, a collection of forum posts compiled by Matteo Bittanti and published in January by Concrete Press, Bittanti’s publishing company. The posts, which were made on the website of the video-game company Electronic Arts, address homelessness in the 2013 version of the urban- and social-engineering game SimCity.

I have about 100 homeless. My population is about 220k at the moment. So not exactly a homeless epidemic but I just can’t seem to get them into homes. Every single park in my city is complaining about them. I find it both irritating and depressing that I cannot solve this issue. I would be more than happy to build a homeless shelter if the game had the option.

Jobs!

Unemployment is always bad but unfilled jobs does NOT mean that everyone was able to get to work on time during a given shift. Sims can get caught up in traffic and get fired or stop looking for a job.

I wouldn’t bother with jobs but instead create low-wealth housing for them to move into and then destroy the buildings to remove them permanently. Harsh but it should solve the issue.

Once you have homeless, they hang out, panhandling and eating garbage. Make sure your garbage collection is operating adequately and they will either disappear (die?) or wander off down the highway.

Regional buses and trains ship them away.

More police to shoot them down.

Build a room around them and set it on fire.

Can’t you drop them in a swimming pool, then remove the ladder?

Be careful, you need a healthy supply of low-wealth Sims, unless you really think that the guy with a master’s degree and multimillion-dollar inheritance is going to push mops or work a register.

I think it has to do with transitioning to higher-wealth homes to the point where low wealth have no homes. Keep those ghettos.

Perhaps once they get enough money from panhandling, or happiness from rummaging through garbage, they’ll leave town.

Starve them.

You have to demolish EVERY abandoned building in your city. They’ll start to move out when they have no more abandoned buildings to hide in.

A way to convert them into a fuel source would be nice. Or maybe a homeless storage unit at the trade depot? The global market can always use cheap labor.

I want a SimMurderer who specializes in killing the SimHomeless.

UFOs should start collecting them as laboratory experiments.

If you can get all your homeless close together, drop a tornado on them — will have some collateral damage but it seems to get rid of them fairly effectively.

I had a meteor disaster happen, leaving radiation. I tried to place a lot of parks around the radiation for them to live and hopefully die in. . . . It didn’t work. =(

There’s an add-on called gestapo — they will quietly remove your homeless to a safe and secure location, never to be heard from again.

Target practice?

“Simlent Green” factory.

Bulldozing them doesn’t work :/

Homeless in SimCity are exactly like real-life homeless: the fact that they exist shows how disconnected the country is toward their existence. Putting them into a video game is IMHO just wrong on so many levels.

The zombies will remove them. Just give it time.