Reading through the threads it seems like a lot of people echo my thoughts about the tedious housing issue. The best idea I've read so far is to make housing not count towards the tile limit. I would like to take this further. Here's my idea:
1) You don't place housing manually around the city, they are placed automatically when you decide to build houses.
2) Housing buildings aren't separated to different groups at all, you only have one single 'Build Housing' option. This option starts building more houses each turn at a rate relative to the level at which your housing techs are. As in during the beginning when you build housing you increase the population cap by, say, 5 per turn. When you are able to build better housing buildings, you increase the cap by 20 a turn. Graphically the houses are scattered around your city center, but take no room from improvements. Once your population cap reaches the requirements for next city level, you are informed and can build something else. Of course you can stop building houses earlier as well, to slowly increase the cap. In addition to making building houses less tedious, this would be much more graphically pleasing as your cities grow larger. There's nothing to prevent a couple of huts and such be quite far (many tiles) from the city center while still belonging to the city.
3) Food production is displayed in max supportable population, not food unit production. This is required to make the building method of point number 2 more intuitive. This also makes it easier for players to understand how much one unit of food is worth.
4) Population needed for each level is more clearly shown in the city screen, to help players better plan which cities to keep building houses in.
I also have a suggestion related to the improvement building that I'll add here:
A) Make the maximum distance you can place improvements in dependent on amount of population you have in the city.
B1) Get rid of the requirement to place all improvements next to already existing improvements. This would allow us to create more aesthetic cities and when we have improvements that require adjacent buildings prevent city building from becoming a tedious game of tetris.
B2) This would also prevent the requirement to make stupid looking cities to prevent the opponent from reaching the other side of a city by building improvements on the pathway, instead the blockage would be automatic once the city is big enough.
B3) Plus, making the UI clearly show how far away from the city center you can build, it is easier to get a grasp of if you can ever reach the Iron Ore deposit or not.
