Abandoned!?

You may or may not have run into this problem of having abandoned buildings. If you have, you will want to try to solve this problem as soon as possible. If you click the question mark at the bottom and click the abandoned building it may help to shed some light on why the building is abandoned. It will say one of two things (at the top of the window that pops up).

Number 1:
It will tell you that the building was abandoned because of commute time.

Number 2:
It will tell you that the building was abandoned because of low demand.

If the building was abandoned for its commute time then there are a number of ways to solve that. Just see this article on Decreasing that Annoying Commute Time! If you decrease the commute time, sims will want to come to your city more which helps your city to grow and run effectively.

Now if the building was abandoned due to low demand, you don't have to worry as much. Those buildings are abandoned because the desire for them is just low at the time. Since the people will desire different kinds of buildings at different times, you can't really do much about it. If you really want to keep that building, there is something that you can do. (I wouldn't recommend it) but you can lower taxes on that particular area of buildings. This would increase the demand for it, but at the same time it would lower the money that your taking in. Another way that you could do this is to activate some city ordinances that would increase the demand for that kind of RCI (Residential, commercial, or industrial) zone. For instance, let's say a bunch of commercial buildings are being abandeoned because of low demand. You could activate the tourism promotion act ordinance. This would increase the demand for your commercial buildings.

City Trash Can Overflowing?

Okay, you might have gotten pretty far in the game and you begin to realize that you are running out of room to put things (especially landfill). Landfill is much more difficult to place because it dramatically lowers the value of any land that you place it by, so it requires much more space. The best way to lower the impact of landfill in your city is to have as little of it as possible. One of the ways you can prevent this is the use of recycling centers.

Recycling Centers:

Pros:
- Reduce garbage that's being imported to landfills
- Produces no pollution
- Only a moderate expense to keep running

Cons:
- Only serves about 25,000 people. (This will force you to build more to serve a larger pop.)
- This will only reduce the trash intake. (The trash you intake will still be higher)

Incinerators (Power Plants that run off of trash):

Pros:
- Reduces the trash intake considerably. (Will reduce to the point where your landfills become clear again!)
- Produces power that your city can use

Cons:
- Expensive
- Produces lots of pollution

Overall I would recommend recycling centers for cities that have a population that's greater than 10,000 people to 25,000 people and incinerator plants for cities with populations that a greater than 25,000 people.

There are other ways of reducing trash if you really need it. City ordinances can really help with that. These ordinances ecourage people to recycle (which will help your recycling centers to be more effective) and reduce your overall trash levels.

Check Out This Great Video on Laying Out Your City!

This is a Great Video to Further Explain How to Layout Your Transportation System.

For Better Quality/ Full Screen come HERE

Decreasing that Annoying Commute Time

Later on in the game (about 10 - 20 thousand people) you may start having issues with your people's commute time. If you end up with a HIGH commute time people will start leaving you city and abandoning their homes. It's definitely best to try to counter act this problem early in the game because otherwise you may have to destroy several buildings and do countless remodeling and reconstruction projects to get the same effect. So this will be most effective if done early.

Subways are a major key for your victory! Trust me, you want subways all over the place. Whenever you create a new community, construct a subway at every block.

Also, connect your subways to elevated railways that go completely around your city. Make sure to connect the subways to commercial and industrial zones (because this is the whole point of your people getting out of their homes in the first place!)

(Subway to Elevated Rail)

Another way to get your people around town quickly is to use highways. Start off with a clover leaf in the center of you region (Make a ground level one so your elevated rail can get over it). Then have a highway go out of the region in all directions. Then create an avenue that goes in a square around the highway and also goes out of the region. (See Figure 1)

Legend:

Black: Avenue

Blue: Highway

Orange: OnRamps

Red: Clover Leaf

This is a good start to an effective system to dramatically lower to commute time. I hoped this has help. :)

Where to Start? Learn to Effectively Zone your Sim City

After you create your city it's important that you plan it out carefully! Because if you don't... It will be almost impossible to change the layout of your city without completely destroying it. So learn to pause the game and literally take ten minutes planning out your zones.

Residential zones are probably the most important in the game. They're the real meat of your city. So it's important to know where to put them to really make life easier for them. Let me tell you now. Never ever put their zones at the center of the region. It will work out OK for the first 10,000 people you have, but after that the commute times will skyrocket and people will abandon their homes because of it. Putting the Residential zone in the center will probably not lead to a very high population in the end.

Instead, you should place residential zones around a large commercial area. This way, all of your residents will be able to easily able to get to those center areas for work. I've been able to make several cities with a population of over 100,000 people by using this basic technique. If your thinking that it won't work then consider this...

If people in St.Louis want to go have fun they would say, "Let's go downtown!" Downtown is a fancy word for the center of the town. Why would they want to go downtown? Well this is because downtown is where all of the commercial is located. You know (the movies, malls, shops, Go - Karts, and any other fun thing you can imagine).

Now what about that last fancy little zone. Well, it's a little something we call Industrial Zones. These zones are usually high polluters of air, but provide many good jobs to your sims.
These zones will also have their buildings abandoned if you don't give them a place to ship out their materials. So if you have any water in your region, you should build a port onto it and set your industry zoning by it. This way the commute for shipping out industrial materials is much shorter. (And industries absolutely LOVE this). Plus it will also keep unnecessary freight trucks off of your roads which will really help with traffic problems later. If you don't have any water at hand, just build a freight train station. They are still cheap and they carry plenty of freight for the beginning of the game. Just make sure you connect a road to it (so the industrial companies can get the freight to the station) and a railroad leading out of the region that's connected to it.

I'll be posting a whole lot more on here soon so subscribe to continue getting tips to help you in constructing a great city.