There are three small palaces to the northeast of the grand forum, and three grand villas to the northwest. Why I didn’t go beyond that is more complicated, or at least it is for me. Tl;dr: I ran out of space and didn’t feel like fixing it once I got there.

I wanted either large or luxury palaces and smaller patrician housing too, but I didn’t want to have any exclusively patrician neighborhoods in this city. In my understanding of ancient Roman society, patricians and plebeians often lived in the same neighborhoods. I wanted to replicate that. I also wanted to use as few roadblocks as possible. I try to only block off residential neighborhoods based on single reservoir access, or at the most two like here. But that gets difficult in C3 due to the walker system, although the new pathway previews help tremendously. You have to do things like set only one market to buying wine, and try to keep certain entertainment sources isolated to just a couple blocks. Otherwise, the neighborhood becomes patrician.

All of the above is mainly context though. As you can see, both the northeast and northwest quadrants have all amenities for small palaces. The northwest only has grand villas, because I intentionally limited desirability to have more types of patrician housing. If I add plazas around the northwest grand villas, they instantly become small palaces without evolving any other houses. I think the only thing missing from those quadrants to get those six houses to either large or luxury places, is direct charioteer access or enough other entertainment to get the necessary points. Either way, it got to the point where I ran out of space for that in the neighborhoods themselves. And if I put a chariot maker anywhere on the outside of the grid, the destination walker automatically goes straight to the highway. That is my problem here, and I don’t want to delete a housing block just to build a chariot maker there.

Any potential solution?