Why doesn't anyone want to work in the forest?

Question

I've got a city of almost 30,000, and an industrial park that's working reasonably well. There's a forest right nearby, and I thought — hey, why not expand into that and reduce the need for imported raw materials? So, I built a little zone dedicated to forestry, and soon, forest-businesses cropped up.

But, as you can see from the screenshot below, almost no one wants to work there. And you can also see that is unique to this new area — the main industrial park has no problem.

It's not zero, though — businesses attract a worker or two — but not enough to avoid quick failure. I thought: hmmm, maybe people don't want to travel that far, or maybe they're overeducated... so, I added a residential area to the zone, and added the "school's out!" policy (prefer work over education).

This got populated quickly, and I made a bus line which runs around the circle and connected some bike lanes, but it doesn't seem to help:

I have a metro station connected to other big population centers, but this doesn't seem to help at all. It's not that the station is unused; in fact, there's a small crowd waiting for the train...

... but, it isn't people looking to come in for work, or going home after working here. It's people from the new forest residential area traveling a long way away to their jobs in the city center. There's even a couple of overzealous high school students flagrantly violating the "school's out" policy to travel way across town to high school.

What might be going on and how can I address this?

Answer 1

Maybe you should give it a time. Because you're having such low industrial interest right now (yellow bar in the control panel, next to the residential and commercial ones).

Answer 2

Build more residential and commercial areas.

When you look at the colored green, blue and orange bars in the HUD bar, you will notice that your city has almost no need for industrial buildings, but a lot of need for commercial and residential buildings.

That means you have a shortage of workers and a lack of demand for industrial goods. Those two are very bad conditions for new industrial buildings to form (regardless of resource type).

To mitigate the problem, designate more commercial areas so you have a higher demand for wood products. Also designate more residential areas so you have more workers available for both your new commercial and industrial areas.