I see Downtown more as a place to go to have fun - so I have the following : a dance club. a fancy restaurant; a less fancy restaurant; a spa; a picnic park; a sport complex; a clothing store; a casino; a club with a pool table; a swimming pool complex; a couple of bars offering various kinds of entertainment; a live music hall; an art gallery; an internet cafe; a club for astronomers (frequented by my Knowledge Sims); a library and a beach. I have no Sims living in my downtown hood but if I wanted to put a poor family in there I might consider the caravan apartments in the bin - used them before, found them fun, even though I don't really play apartments.

I often put one in my apartment lots. Because they're non-functional, I don't like to waste an entire lot on them. I will also put them in a row of shops. That lot I put in the pictures thread a couple of days ago has a launderette.

Other things I include on a lot of shopping lots: post office, internet cafe, greengrocers (I guess that's obvious but I like building them for some reason), newsagent.

If I build a large mall, I usually make the owner the owner of the mall, with bandatron's dotted around the mall. The stores are all "owned" by other sims - I play with townies, so usually pretend they're owned by sims that are not playable - and have automatic tills (from simlogical, I believe). So if a sim goes shopping in the mall, they pay for every hour they spend there, and they pay for the items by the automatic tills. All of those revenues together go to the mall owner, as "rent" income from the stores there.

Around the Sims has a set of launderette machines that includes one with a little tv on it. I put that into the launderette room in my apartment buildings along with the deco bits and the surface-washers and then the sims have a reason to go in there and sit. They don't, often, because my apartment dwelling sims spend every possible mnute playing in the street.

Mini-update for you guys- Here are the lots I already have and some planned ones:

-Clothing Store
-Grocery Store
-Food Kiosks from BV as fast food
-"Trendy" coffee shop
-Fish Store (sim-owned business)
-Lake/pond (it's pretty small)
-Small park
-Playground
-2 Restaurants
-Spa
-Library
-Public pool
-Bowling alley (needs renovation)
-Graveyard
-YMCA/ gym
-Vocational School (using Paladin's mods)
-Tabloid office
-Lounge
-Gambling house
-Night club

Soon to come
-Youth Center
-Soccer feild
-Bank (using that one bank mini-EP from... somewhere?)
-Central Park
-Pizza place

The washing machine I have is 'functional' in that they do animations and gain skill and I never end up using it. Laundry is low on the priority list I guess. I'll have to look into it once Christmas in the hood is passed. Right now Santa is turning up at every home that has a child age sim and it's a lot easier than I remember, he seems to spawn as soon as I pull those cookies from the oven. One NPC car and one stereo so far. I think getting the lump of coal is going to be tricky. Wouldn't want him at every house with his annoying hohohoing and pee pee peeing. That and the school, that is important and they don't have one. They have double summer so double summer holidays. *isn't too sure how well the stranded of education will be there*

Has anyone mentioned a bowling ally and or rink? It has a tiny bowling ally with a roller skating rink. I changed the ice skating for roller skating. It's so cutely retro I had forgotten. I have to do the place up to look like the 1950's.

I have functional washing machine and dryer. My well to do families have a laundry room and my upper middle class families just have them set up in their garage. Never thought to build a Laundromat, though. They gain cleaning skills while using them and have this funny little dance they do while washing clothes. I can't imagine a line of these in one place and everyone doing that funny little dance.

Here in my hometown we have 2 parks (well really more but I'm only going to talk about 2 of them). One is Hemming Park, it is the main station for the city bus line. It is filled with trees and benches and within walking distance of the new Courthouse. The other is Friendship Park which is located just across the river. It is named after the fountain sitting in it's center (Friendship Fountain). It is nothing but concrete and the fountain. It is within walking distance of the Sports Complex. In my game, I kind of merged the two together. I have the biggest fountain in game, in the center with trees, paths, benches, swings and so forth. A nice place for my sims families to have a Sunday picnic.

I also, have a Courthouse, jail, Town Square, museum, bank, sports complex (with enclosed ice rink, I'm from the south this is where we ice skate), bus station, arcade, 2 bars, and a strip joint. My game is more or less set up like my hometown and even though they are trying to "clean up" downtown, it is still seedy after hours.

All other businesses like sub shop, flower shop, produce and fish markets, and so on are located in sub hoods.

I'm off to build a laundromat. I just got to see a line of sims dancing doing their laundry.

Which washer and dryer do you use?

I think its by Rebeka at Affinity sims.

This is the washer and dryer I use
http://www.affinitysims.com/IPB/fil...sher-and-dryer/

Edit: forgot they gain hygiene, too.

Yes that's what I have. There is an older one, but that newer version is better. I just wish they didn't gain comfort from it, I've certainly never gained comfort or hygiene from washing my husbands sweaty gym things or baby items with poop, or scrubbing grass stains out of kids jeans knees.

That didn't make sense to me either, but what can we do?

I'm going to take a look at it SimPE but it's probably beyond my simple capabilities.

I've never gained comfort from doing the laundry, but on the other hand, when I go to sleep on freshly-cleaned sheets in a freshly-made bed, I swear I sleep much better than otherwise. So maybe that's where the comfort comes in? The being clean rather than the act of cleaning?

I think the hygiene gain is when the washer is done and they change into the clean clothes, but if you can alter it let me know.

I don't even see a mention to comfort, there are a lot of files and someone with some skill would need to change that. The only thing I changed is to take it from the outdoor category.

I guess when I get time, I might take a look at it, but I don't have that much experience with SimPE. But would be worth the experience, if I tried.

It's interesting. It's a very involved mod.

I love laundromats. I usually have one in the seedy side of "downtown" (whether Downtown is a separate subhood or just a part of the main hood that I've designated as "downtown."), so the folks whose places don't have washers/dryers can go and do their wash there. (Which I make them do because I have those functional washer/dryers from Affinity Sims in my game.)

Unfortunately, Sims won't use those washer/dryers autonomously, so no one actually does laundry there except the playables I send there. I'm going to see if I can make those objects autonomous without breaking them, however...

Anyway, for my downtowns, I tend to like to have the seedier side and the higher-class side. The latter is usually near the neighborhood-deco skyscrapers and such, with the seedier part shoved on the outskirts, in a corner where the deco is more of the water-tower and radio-tower and power plant variety. The housing in the higher end is luxury apartments and some rowhouse-like townhomes, mostly rented, some owned, and there are "nicer" places to shop like nice boutiques and a small grocery store that in my mind is more of a higher-end natural-foody sort, like a Trader Joe's, and nice restaurants and fancy gyms/spas and clubs and such. The seedier side is filled with vacant lots full of debris intermixed with 1x1 lots where the homeless live in tents, a couple Jo's hostels, an asylum, a soup kitchen for the down-and-out, motels-that-become-cheap-apartments, and maybe a slightly nicer building for those who almost have enough money to escape to the suburbs or to the higher-end side of downtown. Plus there are lower end/seedy places like fast food joints, the aforementioned coin-op laundry, seedier-looking stores, a convenience store sort of grocery, the smoke shop, a pool hall, bars, a seedy place to gamble, ye olde strip club, etc.

In the "middle ground," I like to build city parks, large and small, and civic buildings as well. A post office, a tax office, a library, a medical clinic, museums of various sorts, newsstands, coffee shops, a performance hall, a city hall/courthouse kind of thing, which is sometimes just neighborhood deco. Then there's usually a train station and a bus station. Some of these are just intended to be decorative. Some are more meant to be visited as functioning community lots. Some are actual residences; I usually have police/fire stations, which I make livable for single folks in the Law Enforcement career or the NPC firefighter career I have.

Pretty much, anything I can imagine, I'll make. I generally don't have the patience to do the "row" effect that cities usually have, but for my playing purposes, I don't really care.

I fail to see any reason to give Sims laundry to do - it's bad enough that one has to do it in real life However, I think your hood is pretty complete and it does look stunning