You need to pay attention to land value when building a city in Cities: Skylines. Residential and commercial buildings can only reach their maximum levels in areas with high enough land values. Areas with low land values will not have the highest-level buildings. This will have an impact on your city’s budget because the highest-level residential and commercial buildings pay the most tax. This is how you can increase land value in Cities: Skylines to make your city more prosperous.
Read also: 8 Ways to Reduce Traffic in Cities: Skylines
Build Lots of Parks and Recreation Areas
Building lots of parks and recreation areas throughout your city is one of the best ways to increase land value in Cities: Skylines. Parks and recreation are leisure sites that enhance the natural beauty of your city and attract tourists. Those park attractions with higher entertainment values increase land value more. However, add a variety of parks and recreation areas to your city that will appeal to all ages. For example, playgrounds and bouncy castles are great for kids but not so good for older citizens.
A park area
Expand Service Access
Service access is another important contributing factor to land value. Areas where general service access is limited will likely have lower land values. So, make sure you have plenty of schools, police, fire, and medical service buildings throughout your city to ensure everyone has decent service access. However, remember that adding service buildings also increases budgetary costs. So, don’t get too carried away with expanding service access.
Land value info
Reduce Noise Pollution With Trees
Noise pollution lowers land value in Cities: Skylines. Thus, reducing noise pollution in the worst affected parts of your city will increase land value. You can reduce noise pollution by adding lots of trees around noisy things such as train stations, airports, and harbors. Click the noise filter on your map to identify noisy areas and add many big trees around the sources.
Trees around a train station
Or you can keep some noisy things away from residential zones altogether. Don’t build train stations, airports, wind turbines, and harbors too near your residential districts. Note that some unique buildings can also generate a lot of noise.
Add Tree-Lined Roads
There are many different types of roads you can add to your city in Cities: Skylines. Tree-lined roads are the best ones for increasing land values. Those are roads aligned with decorative trees that curb noise pollution generated by traffic. So, add lots of small and large tree-lined roads throughout your city.
Select the High-Tech Housing Policy
High-Tech Housing is a policy that increases land values around residential areas by turning residences into smart homes. The description for this policy says it amounts to “slightly increased land value.” So, selecting High-Tech Housing as a city-wide policy will certainly increase land value, but it’s not entirely clear by how much. Note that it also costs ₡4 a week for each high-tech residence.
The High-Tech Housing policy
Select the Parks and Recreation Policy
Selecting the Parks and Recreation policy is another way to increase land value in Cities: Skylines. This policy makes parks and plazas even better for increasing land value. The policy does that by increasing the budget allocation for parks by 20 percent.
However, you can always increase the budget allocation to parks without that policy. To do so, bring up the budget screen and drag the slider for the parks and recreation bar further right. For example, you can make parks more effective by increasing their budget allocation to 150 percent.
The Parks and Recreation policy
Keep Residential and Commercial Districts Away From Polluted Areas
Ground and water pollution also brings down land values for residential and commercial districts affected by it (but doesn’t affect industrial building levels). Rather than trying to combat such pollution, the best thing to do is keep your residential zones away from industrial buildings that pollute. Leave some empty spaces in your city if necessary to ensure the pollution from industry doesn’t affect residential areas.
Note that farming and forestry industrial buildings don’t cause ground pollution. So, adding commercial and residential blocs nearer to such industrial districts won’t affect their land value so much. However, forest and farming buildings will still cause noise pollution.
An industrial district
Build the Eden Project
Adding the Eden Project is a great way to increase land value in Cities: Skylines when you’ve unlocked it. The Eden Project is a monument that considerably increases land value by raising your city’s profile and reducing pollution. In real life, the Eden Project is the giant greenhouse attraction in Cornwall, England.
However, you can only add monuments to your city when it has reached the highest Megalopolis milestone and you’ve purchased nine land areas. You’ll also need to add the Statue of Industry, Official Park, Gateway Arch, Cathedral of Plentitude, Servicing Services Offices, and Friendly Neighbourhood Park unique buildings to unlock the Eden Project.
There aren’t many other ways to increase land value in Cities: Skylines beyond what’s listed above. Remember that parks and recreation, services, and pollution are the three biggest factors that affect land value. Make sure your city’s residential and commercial areas have lots of parks, good service access (education especially), and aren’t heavily polluted to keep land value up. Most of your buildings will then reach their highest levels, from which your city will reap more tax revenue.
