Overcoming "The Peanut Butter Point"

[Simoleman 34]

DEALING WITH "THE PEANUT BUTTER POINT" THE EASY WAY

So you've been building a city, steadily adding zones and watching its population grow.

Until it doesn't seem to want to grow anymore.

The empty green and blue and yellow zones mock you. Maybe you're even seeing a few of your buildings abandoned. And you can't figure out why.

Someone dubbed this phenomenon "the peanut butter point," that place where a city just seems to get stuck.

There have been various suggestions for dealing with this problem, but at least some of them are overly complicated, or more than a little risky. Allow me to share my experience, which I think is instructive, and to offer a simple solution.

I had planned my City of Worthington to be the crown jewel of my region, and grow it to at least 500,000. But when it got to 420,000, it stopped growing, and even began to shrink. I don't know why. Maybe its simcitizens found life in neibhboring localities more appealing.

Of course, one thing to try would be to do everything you can to make life in those neighboring cities less appealing. But really, that strikes me as being akin to using "cheats." It's just not realistic, and I try to make the game as realistic as possible.

I tried stuffing more amenities into the city. More landmarks. More parks and plazas. More trees. (Actually, you'd be surprised how often planting about 100 trees every simyear does help.) An art gallery. An opera house. A baseball stadium. All met with a collective yawn. And all that stuff was costing money. My treasury was beginning to lose money. My dream of creating something of a simtopia was fading.

Well, desperate times call for desperate measures. On the advice of a little supply-side economist in my head, I wiped out all of the nice but expensive ordinances, lowered the tax rates by about a third (from 9% to 6%), and pretty soon, presto! People started moving in and the demand bars started moving back up. Now, I've got a thriving, very profitable city of 550,000, and its growing. I have little doubt that if I had not gradually added back the ordinances, and the taxes to pay for them, it would be even bigger.

My experience with Worthington and some of my other cities leads me to this inescapable conclusion: The tax rates matter more, by far, than any other factor or combination of factors in the game. My City of Enterprise has little in the way of schools and hospitals, and has NO public parks or plazas or other public amenities. But from the beginning, it's been a boom town. Because the tax rate is about 2% for commercial and 5.5% for residential/industrial.

The only prerequisite to this strategy is that you should have enough money in your treasury to sustain some early negative cash flow from the tax cuts. Cutting out the ordinances is the only serious budget cutting I would do; I didn't hear a peep out of 'em about that. But if you start cutting into the fire department or sanitation or hospitals or schools, things can get nasty.

The positive effects might not be immediate, but if taxes are low enough, then (to paraphrase Kevin Costner in Field of Dreams), "Zone it, and they will come."

And there's even more good news. Once residents or businesses/industries have located in the city, they're unlikely to leave if you gradually raise the rates back to reasonable levels (I'd recommend nothing over 9%).

More development... more people... more money.... It's win, win, win.

[SimCoug 5,972]

DEALING WITH "THE PEANUT BUTTER POINT" THE EASY WAY

So you've been building a city, steadily adding zones and watching its population grow.

Until it doesn't seem to want to grow anymore.

The empty green and blue and yellow zones mock you. Maybe you're even seeing a few of your buildings abandoned. And you can't figure out why.

Someone dubbed this phenomenon "the peanut butter point," that place where a city just seems to get stuck.

There have been various suggestions for dealing with this problem, but at least some of them are overly complicated, or more than a little risky. Allow me to share my experience, which I think is instructive, and to offer a simple solution.

I had planned my City of Worthington to be the crown jewel of my region, and grow it to at least 500,000. But when it got to 420,000, it stopped growing, and even began to shrink. I don't know why. Maybe its simcitizens found life in neibhboring localities more appealing.

Of course, one thing to try would be to do everything you can to make life in those neighboring cities less appealing. But really, that strikes me as being akin to using "cheats." It's just not realistic, and I try to make the game as realistic as possible.

I tried stuffing more amenities into the city. More landmarks. More parks and plazas. More trees. (Actually, you'd be surprised how often planting about 100 trees every simyear does help.) An art gallery. An opera house. A baseball stadium. All met with a collective yawn. And all that stuff was costing money. My treasury was beginning to lose money. My dream of creating something of a simtopia was fading.

Well, desperate times call for desperate measures. On the advice of a little supply-side economist in my head, I wiped out all of the nice but expensive ordinances, lowered the tax rates by about a third (from 9% to 6%), and pretty soon, presto! People started moving in and the demand bars started moving back up. Now, I've got a thriving, very profitable city of 550,000, and its growing. I have little doubt that if I had not gradually added back the ordinances, and the taxes to pay for them, it would be even bigger.

My experience with Worthington and some of my other cities leads me to this inescapable conclusion: The tax rates matter more, by far, than any other factor or combination of factors in the game. My City of Enterprise has little in the way of schools and hospitals, and has NO public parks or plazas or other public amenities. But from the beginning, it's been a boom town. Because the tax rate is about 2% for commercial and 5.5% for residential/industrial.

The only prerequisite to this strategy is that you should have enough money in your treasury to sustain some early negative cash flow from the tax cuts. Cutting out the ordinances is the only serious budget cutting I would do; I didn't hear a peep out of 'em about that. But if you start cutting into the fire department or sanitation or hospitals or schools, things can get nasty.

The positive effects might not be immediate, but if taxes are low enough, then (to paraphrase Kevin Costner in Field of Dreams), "Zone it, and they will come."

And there's even more good news. Once residents or businesses/industries have located in the city, they're unlikely to leave if you gradually raise the rates back to reasonable levels (I'd recommend nothing over 9%).

More development... more people... more money.... It's win, win, win.

I agree that taxes have a big influence on growth. I’ve also found that if I develop cities surrounding the “stuck” city, once I return to that city I see a boom in development.

[Simoleman 34]

That is a very good point: Developing surrounding cities will help your "stuck" city in-stick. One of the problems with my big city is that, of the eight localities surrounding it, I made the mistake of limiting growth in five of them. If (when) I start another region, I'll make sure the cities or towns whose smaller character I wish to preserve will not border my big city. Thanks!