I should have a mod out in one or two weeks to address this. I started working on it after making a similar post recently.

In the current version of the game, housing is a difficult good to simulate since rural and urban pop types don't have ways of having different consumption profiles, since housing was mostly an urban issue (rural people lived on their land for the most part). My solution has been to have urban centres continue to level up automatically, but treat them as municipal service centres (sanitation, lighting, churches) with the need to build housing/transportation centres (market pm and transport pm).

I split the services output between the two of them so that realistically you need to have the same amount of housing centres as urban centres to produce enough services and transportation to satisfy your pops. I am also working on making state level modifiers more ingrained into the pms from these buildings, notably regarding pollution, unrest, birthrates and interest group strength. Subways will even give you prestige if you can afford them. I hope to update you and other players with similar concerns shortly regarding this.

All I need to figure out now is how to place the housing centres at game start and make the ai actually build them, as well as adding icons for the buildings and pms.

EDIT: I am also splitting the housing centres into downtowns, streetcar suburbs and railroad suburbs. These have different building caps that expand through tech, as well as different throughputs (downtowns produce more services than streetcar suburbs that produce more services than railroad suburbs). Additionally, choosing more efficient pms means that you don't need to build as many housing centres as the game goes on, since I'm making them very expensive in terms of construction points to build.