If you believe that an unoccupied neighborhood may have become corrupted, here's a simple way to create a new neighborhood and copy over some or all of the lots.

This technique may also allow you to safely remove all sims from an occupied TS2 neighborhood, as long as you don't have any occupied apartment buildings. If you do have occupied apartments, be sure to move all of your sim families out of the apartments before attempting this technique.

1) Move your old neighborhood out of your "The Sims 2" directory; I'll call this neighborhood V1. Put it in a safe place, we'll need it later.
2) Create your new neighborhood; I'll call it V2

If the neighborhood number matters, do the following:
3) Rename the neighborhood directory to the correct neighborhood number
4) Rename all files and directories within the new neighborhood to have the correct neighborhood number prefix
5) Use SimPE to edit the ID for V2 (* see below for an alternative method)
- UID:
- (parent) Name:

If you haven't got the correct terrain, roads, deco, etc. in your new neighborhood:
6) Use HoodReplace to copy terrain and structures from V1 to V2

Now that your neighborhood is set up correctly, let's copy those lots:
7) Use SimPE to extract all Lot Descriptions (LTXT) from V1
8) Use SimPE to add all Lot Descriptions into V2
9) Note down lot numbers for any lots which you no longer want
10) Delete LTXT for any lots that you don't want

11) Copy all lot packages from V1 to V2, except for the lot numbers that you noted in step 9 above.
12) Copy neighborhood PNG from V1 to V2

* Alternatively, you might want to do this:
- Use SimPE to extract ID from V1
- Use SimPE to replace ID for V2 with ID from V1