Six things that boost land values in SimCity 3000

Contributor/author(s): John K

A lot has been written regarding boosting land values, but one or two things may have been missed. Below is what I do normally when building a city, and it has worked almost every time for me to boost my commercial and eventually my residential to astronomical levels. I haven't run my cities very far (being married reduces my SC3000 time considerably), but I've had some excellent luck by following a few basic rules and techniques:

1. The "zone across the river technique". I've used this one to great effect a lot. I build residential and commercial lots on one side of the river, and industrial on the other side. This is expensive to set up in the beginning, but it keeps the pollution constrained to one side. I also put the Toxic Waste factory, Prison, Military Barracks, Jail, Defense Contractor, Casino, Incinerators, Recycling centers, landfills, polluting Power plants, Airports and Seaports on the Industrial side.
2. Surrounding the commercial centers: Commercial centers work best when placed in the center of the city with residential areas surrounding them. I usually have the commercial areas in an inner ring, with residential areas in an outer one.
3. Sufficient supporting services: Fire, Police, Education and Health must meet or exceed your population's needs. I overlap my police stations excessively and max out their funding, to ensure there's almost no crime. I also max out funding for Health, Education, and Fire protection (It gives you a bigger fire protection radius.
4. Using a 14x14 or 14x16 grid. Using a 14x14 grid allows me to build 8 4x4 Dense commercial grids with a nice center in the middle for a train station and value enhancements, like Parks, ponds, playgrounds, fountains, etc. It also keeps a one block distance between all buildings, in order to put in a bus station or subway station between buildings. I like the 16x4 grid for residential areas, as it allows each of the 4x4 residential blocks to only touch one road (meaning, no corner lots).
5. Mass transit: It seems like the better my mass transit is, the better my land values increase, especially for commercial zones. I like to place a bus station between two commercial zones with a subway station right behind it. This maximizes my mass transit usage. Every zone block has access to at least one or the other mass transit options, preferably both. I also try to add a Rail station in the middle as another option. Don't worry about subsidizing Mass Transit or the other expensive regulation (shuttle buses?). If you lay your mass transit out effectively, it will get used extensively without you needing to subsidize it.
6. Parks, parks, parks. Nothing in my experience does more to raise land values than saturating your residential and commercial areas with parks. I have lots of parks, ponds, playgrounds, fountains, and sports parks in the center of my commercial and residential blocks. I fill up every empty space with something to enhance property value. People look at parks as some necessity to fulfill. Parks to me are a tax revenue multiplier. I've turned High value Commercial zones into Astronomical, simply by maxing out all the free space with parks. This includes wiping out blocks with trees and replacing them with parks. Parks appear to have higher value over trees...

Hopefully, some of these techniques will help you to maximize your land values and get your properties into the "astronomical" zone as quickly as possible. Good Luck!

See also
Aura specifics
Improve land value/pollution conditions w/ trees
The park phalanx: a better park layout
Raise land value to Astronomical
Increasing land value: more than just trees
Land value: the center of the equation
Land value: points for the young city
Increasing land value: strategies