The strongest crop in Banished

Managing population fluctuations, both local and city-wide, is one of the biggest challenges of Banished. But with the right technique, it isn't one which can't be overcome.

When you need some household to migrate to another location, build a new house for them in the new location and just before the new house is finished, order their old house to get removed. They will then become homeless and migrate to the new house the moment it is finished.

Single households are in fact quite handy in this regard, because they give you a higher flexibility (you can move a single worker and don't have to move two at the same time). The downside is, of course, that more houses require more resources to build and more fuel to keep warm.

As a result of population fluctuations you will soon notice that workers who used to live close to their jobs will switch jobs and have suddenly a new job which is far more remote. To solve this issue you should regularly (every couple years) unassign all jobs by making everyone laborers and then reassign the desired number of workers to each occupation, starting with those where you consider proximity most critical. When you add a worker to an occupation, the laborer closest to an open job of that occupation will be converted, so by reassigning regularly you can re-optimize who does which job.

The difference is that your laborers will bring resources only to the barn or stockpile closest to the resource, while the vendors employed in the market will actively seek out resources from all around town and try to keep their market stocked with a wide variety of different goods.

When you use only barns, each barn will only contain the resources produced in its vicinity. That means when your town grows (and you do not produce everything decentralized) your villagers will need to walk large distances to obtain a specific resource. But when you cover your town with markets, they will just have to visit the nearest market to obtain whatever resource they need. This will not just save them lots of time they can then spend working, it will also allow villagers to easily consume all of the different kinds of food your village has available, and a greater food variety will improve their health.

By the way: The market will only store resources which can either be consumed by houses or by workshops. There is one important resource which is consumed by neither and thus will not be stored in markets: Stone.