'Cities: Skylines II' Found a Solution for High Rents: Get Rid of Landlords

In the same vein, Simon Librande, lead designer of Sim City, decided to pretend that basically all plots above low density just have absurdly huge, invisible (underground) parking lots, otherwise a car centric city very often just turns into half parking lots.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240506163714/https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/05/the-philosophy-of-simcity-an-interview-with-the-games-lead-designer/275724/

Geoff Manaugh: While you were making those measurements of different real-world cities, did you discover any surprising patterns or spatial relationships?

Librande: Yes, definitely. I think the biggest one was the parking lots. When I started measuring out our local grocery store, which I don't think of as being that big, I was blown away by how much more space was parking lot rather than actual store. That was kind of a problem, because we were originally just going to model real cities, but we quickly realized there were way too many parking lots in the real world and that our game was going to be really boring if it was proportional in terms of parking lots.

Manaugh: You would be making SimParkingLot, rather than SimCity.

Librande: [laughs] Exactly. So what we do in the game is that we just imagine they are underground. We do have parking lots in the game, and we do try to scale them -- so, if you have a little grocery store, we'll put six or seven parking spots on the side, and, if you have a big convention center or a big pro stadium, they'll have what seem like really big lots -- but they're nowhere near what a real grocery store or pro stadium would have. We had to do the best we could do and still make the game look attractive.

EDIT: I got some details mixed up, corrected and expanded now.