City Life does an excellent job in its micro-management, giving the player a number of indicators for keeping each of its citizens happy. Is there enough housing? Are there plenty of shopping and schools available for each class of people in your town? What about their health and safety? And of course your city folks have to have some kind of fun activities. Each particular class of citizen has different kinds of expectations for their happiness. The poorer classes may need simple things like schools and shopping while the elite may need more luxury items to keep them fulfilled. The trick is to have a metropolis that keeps all of these classes happy. And no, you can't simply make a city full of just have-nots or elites in order to run a successful city.

Since you have to have all six classes in your city, that also means you have to deal with the game's version of real world class conflicts. In other words, the have-nots tend not to like the elites and vice-versa. If you have sections of your city where you have two opposing classes near each other you can expect to see things like crime and other conflicts between the two, including full scale riots. In a way, City Life is more like a strategy game than a builder with this particular feature. You have to be able to pick locations and offer services in those locations to keep the social conflict between the classes down to a minimum. The have-nots tend to mesh better if their neighbors are the blue collar, for example.