Getting out of a deep debt in SimCity 3000

Contributor/author(s): Mayor Joe

Is your city treasury in the negative digits? Does the news ticker say something about being in the red, and out of the green, and sims feeling blue? Well I have the perfect answer to your problem.

First, you pause the game. Then you cut all of your city department funding back to 1%. Now press play and let it run. With the underfunding of the departments, everybody seems to go on strike. Now's a good time to raise residential taxes up to 11%, and keep industrial and commercial at 7%. Then hold on for the long haul. How long you say? Well it depends on how much debt you are into. If you have all of your loans maxed out, then you're in it for about 30 years in city time. If you only have a few little loans, and aren't really deep, then maybe about 3 years. When you start to get the loans paid off, and start to get a positive cash flow, you can start easing the funding up, but never let your cash flow go below 1,000. When you start to get close to full funding, people start moving back in, and businesses set up. When you get to gaining 6,000 a year, then you can fully fund all of the departments.

Note: this method has not been fully tested, but might serve you well as a last-ditch effort to revive a dying and debt-riddled city.

See also
Increase your city's kitty
Save a few bucks on technicalities
Borrowing: rule of thumb to stay our of red