Every mayor of Cities Skylines knows that you cannot be perfect or even available everywhere for everyone. Your citizens could have problems that take time to solve as well and so it happens that some of them don’t want to wait any longer and leave your beautiful city.
Every leaving citizen means an abandoned building and that is how the whole spiral of abandonment and wasted land starts. But can there be something done about it?
Let’s have a look at what you could do with abandoned in Cities Skylines!
For the start let’s show how abandoned buildings occur in the city. In the images below you could see three arrows that mark three office buildings with the same problem.
The green arrow is pointed to the building with not enough workers. The yellow arrow on the other hand is pointed to the building which has the same exact problem with not enough workers but it is at its critical stage at the same time (it’s been a long time since this building did not have a problem)…
… and the last arrow (orange) is an abandoned office, once again with not enough workers. We have to say that with each problem such as these, you have always some time to fix them. However, in the case it takes too long, the workers won’t be that patient and the buildings became abandoned.
What can I do with abandoned buildings?
The first option that seems attractive is the one where you could destroy such buildings with a bulldozer. However, don’t rush that much and think about what you could do with it. When you bulldoze an abandoned building, the zone will be opened for brand-new buildings. That seems easy, right? However, despite all of that mentioned before, it has its pitfalls.
When you destroy an abandoned building you just fix half of the problem. If you don’t fix the problems which caused the abandonment, then the next building will be abandoned after some time once again. Therefore you must search for problems and focus on them.
Don’t be afraid if you can’t search any near building with problems. If you make some mistakes (with pollution, traffic or taxes) you will see some building issues soon.
How do you bulldoze an abandoned building?
My best advice is that you should do this manually, because you want to know (how we saw above) about the problems that caused the whole process of abandonment. I recommend this for any players which want to optimize the city – you need to know about problems and their origins to solve them!
But if you want to automatize this manual work you could. At Steam workshop is a mod called Bulldoze It! and with this mod, you could set up to destroy all abandoned buildings at one specific time. Or you could click and this mod will destroy all abandoned buildings.
There were more plugins but Bulldoze It!
Is more advanced and works in the last versions.
Typical problems which cause abandoned buildings and how to fix them.
First, I have to start with a screenshot and with the information where you could get information why is the building abandoned. As we can see on our screenshot, the arrow points to the icon and coincidentally that is the right place where when you point your cursor, you will get the information about why is the building abandoned.
In our case, the main problem is insufficient number of workers. In my experience, such a problem appears when you have complications in the matter of education so the company can’t employ workers that are qualified. The solutions can be focusing on traffic where the workers have offices, focusing on the industry nearby or paying attention to having enough educated workers.
Not enough goods to sell is another problem and it arises in moments when your commercial zones don’t have goods to sell. This can happen when you have a bad traffic situation in the city and so the imported goods are making their way to individual buildings too slowly. This problem happens if the city is only connected to the highway. If you connect the city to the railroad, most of the freight can go on the railroad.
More about not enough goods to sell in Cities Skylines and how to fix it!
Not enough customers are the third problem. It appears in cases when you build commercial zones which aren’t near residential or other zones. In the picture below these problems came to the outskirts of the business district. The right thing to do is to connect this part of the city by public transport or by road. You can also fix it by building another residential area next to it.
More information how to solve problems with not enough customers
Last but not least in importance is the problem with too high taxes. It occurs when you have taxes above 12% in the middle game or above 13% in the early game. The solution is simple and that is to reduce your taxes to 12%. However, in the long run of the game, I recommend playing with taxes at 10% as you will always have room to raise taxes without upsetting your residents.
More info about money in Cities Skylines can be found there:
How make money in Cities Skylines?
In the picture below, the building is burned down and no people are living there. That means that this building is empty and so the space is left unnecessarily unused. If you have problems such as these, I would recommend building more fire stations to improve fire protection coverage.
Tips to solve problems in Cities Skylines
Hardest problems guides not enough customers and not enough goods to sell
Complicated problems could be also with overeducated workers which cause abandoned buildings
How to make money in Cities Skylines and how to get out of debt quickly
Tips to increasing population and understanding how increase residential demand
What is land value and why you need to focus to get happy citizens
To play on bigger map you need unlock more tiles and inside I show how to use full maps
Also you should have problems with power outages and with traffic with which we could also help
Do/Can abandoned buildings repopulate Cities Skylines?
We can say, that abandoned buildings can destroy themselves and in their position could potentially grow new ones. However, such process takes time (4 weeks in-game time).
Therefore it is much better to analyze what causes the abandonment and fix the problem by yourself. After fixing it, you should destroy them, mainly because they have a negative effect on the neighborhood. They have a negative effect on its happiness and land wealth.
Why is my population falling in Cities Skylines?
That’s a good question which may follow the overall problem of abandoned buildings. In case you have some problems with it, I would recommended reading this part and tracking some of your city parts if there aren’t any icons which I’ve written.
