That was fun! The concept is an interesting spin on the theme, and the music has a grand bittersweetness to it.
I'm assuming the ability to build houses on top of themselves, gaining infinite population, as well as the ability to build income districts on top of houses, which only causes -1 population instead of -2 population, are both glitches.
I don't know if I understand the balancing. Since income seems to be locked to one instance per tile, the optimal way to play after the very early game is to simply ignore the residential-commercial synergy and build interlocking crosses of pure commercial-industrial complex, which produce $8 per five tiles, more than enough money to reconfigure the city as needed in the end-game. I'm not sure if this is intentional.
That's my run without using exploits. Below is what my run looked like while exploiting infinite population.
All-in-all, good work!