Cities Skylines Prevent Abandoned Buildings Guide

Cities Skylines Prevent Abandoned Buildings Guide by Tklink90

The past few days I have seen a lot of people asking how to prevent buildings from becoming abandoned. After testing and trying out some stuff I thought it might prove useful to write down what I’ve learned. I will discuss this for each zone type separately. This is by no means a perfect guide, but it should help new players figure out what is causing certain problems and how to fix them.

Residential

This will probably be the zone that people will have the least amount of trouble with. Residential buildings become abandoned because of two reasons:

Not providing the necessary public services

This one is pretty straightforward. Not providing sufficient coverage for garbage, police, health or deathcare will make people leave their house. Not covering fire causes houses to burn down which is pretty much the same effect. Not placing schools/high schools/university doesn’t seem to cause people to leave but it does keep your citizens uneducated. To fix this simply make sure you have enough coverage for the public services, otherwise place more or make sure the existing ones can get around efficiently enough.

Decrease in land value lower then the level of the building

When the land value increases of a residential zone, buildings start to level up. When the value drops due to pollution or noise it can become lower then the required land value for that level. People will then start to complain about land value and eventually leave. To fix this, simply delete the house complaining about land value. A new house will pop up and level back up to the appropriate level compared to the land value.

Commercial

Commercial buildings become abandoned because of three reasons.

Not enough (educated) workers

If the building cannot get enough workers or enough workers of the appropriate educational level it will become abandoned. To fix this, zone in more residential to attract more workers or place more schools to increase the education.

Not enough customers

If a shop cannot sell stuff to enough people, it will eventually go out of business and leave. This one is a bit trickier to solve. If you have a strong demand for residential when this happens, placing more residential zones should fix the problems. If shops are complaining about no customers when you have no demand for residential, your unemployment level is too high. Now I have no way of testing this 100% but it seems that unemployed citizens do not shop or shop a lot less (makes sense). So if there is no demand for residential but your shops are complaining about not enough customers, you need to create more jobs. Try to aim for an unemployment rate of about 10% that seems to work just fine. You can the find the current rate of unemployment in the population tab of the overview menu.

Not having enough goods to sell

If a shop doesn’t have enough to sell, it will go out of business and leave. How to fix this depends on whether or not you have industry or are importing goods for you shops. If you have industry supplying your commercial district, this complaint means there is too little industry to supply your shops. Zoning in more industry should fix this.

If you don’t have any industry and your shops are importing everything this complaint comes from bad traffic flow. It takes the vans with imported goods to long to reach the shops, which causes them to complain about not having enough goods. Improving the flow of traffic so that they can reach the shops quicker should fix this.

Note: I do not know for sure if a very large city (50k+) with lots of commercial can survive without industry and importing only. It might be the case they you will need some industry in order to keep running. Maybe people with very big cities without industry can comment on this.

Industry

Industry buildings will become abandoned because of two reasons.

Not enough workers.

If a factory can’t find enough workers if will go out of business and leave. This is probably by far the most heard complaint when you are building your city and it seems to be the biggest problem people struggle with. The reason buildings cannot find enough workers is because they will probably be overeducated and will not work in the low level industry.

To fix this you need to level up industry so that they will require educated workers. Now to do this you need a provide services to your industry district. The services needed to get to at least level two are: Police HQ, Fire HQ, Hospital and public transport. Industry buildings need these in order to become level two or higher. Bus/metro/train lines need to be active and connected in order for industry to benefit from them.

This is a bigger problem in specialized industry building since they can’t level up. Because they cannot level up, they will always need uneducated workers. So if you want to run specialized industries, you need to manually keep the education level low.

Not enough raw materials

Industry buildings will import raw materials in order to make goods. If they can’t get enough they will eventually go out of business. Trucks that take too long to supply buildings will create this problem. To fix this make sure the traffic in you industry district flows nice and efficiently. Trucks that are taking too long to supply buildings are creating this problem.

Feel free to write down any tips/tricks or bits of knowledge you have found during playing the game, or to correct me if you see something wrong. It might help out people!