I would like to be able to MAKE a simulation of the town I live in.
Using realistic economy to what it costs to live here.
Afterwards, I would like to make it with information from job sites and
housing real estate sites, as well as trans portion information to get around.
Athletics and school as well.

My first intention is for fun.
The second intention for the second sim, is to enable people to find everything
for living in my town all in one site.

I live in Dayton,OH . So I think i would like to CALL the site RUNDYT.com
as a play on RUNDMC

My question now is, where do I start to make this as a website at first and then possibly a PHONE application.
What and where do I find information to begin with this??First you will want to go to godaddy or some other domain name register to secure your domain. It might have already been taken.

Do you have any programming skills to program this yourself or is this something you will need others to program for you?

The census for your town as well as google has lots of info for most towns that show info. You will need to have approved RIGHTS to the data that your using unless its actually public domain classified information that anyone can get without permissions granted.

This sounds like a very large project and you will want to have some money to throw at this project as well as if you can program it yourself it would be the cheapest, but if you need someone else to program it up it could easily cost upwards of $50,000 DEPENDING on how in depth the programming gets. I have doubts that you would find anyone to program this up for free. However you might be able to locate a career programmer and work out a deal in which they get a royalty for any money generated from their code.

Personally its a neat project idea, but information you will have will probably be just a consolidation of information already available on Google, in which you have to worry about disclosure and permissions of others information that you use as your own to avoid getting sued. If you plan on making any money on this, I would say its high risk for failure to take a loss. If you plan on making money on this how are you going to generate revenue? ( Ad supported, or membership fee, or per use fee, or other? )

The easiest setup would be a online calculator that has fields to be populated and then formulas based off of census info for the town. Then in the end it shows a report of some sort with whatever info your trying to provide.

As far as an actual SIM goes, if your looking to run it with algorithms and such that have formulas that are dynamic and info provided dynamic within limits its going to get very complicated. The easiest to program up would be an online calculator, but to have a sim that shows how one thing would affect other things etc to project assumptions based on prior data available. That is when it gets complicated.