I see a lot of people keep asking how to level up their buildings and I have also had problems with figuring that out. After playing for a while and reading up on the subject here is a guild for you:



List of RCI buildings that can upgrade:







Low and High density residential, Low and High density commercial, Generic (non specialized) industry and Offices.



Residential zones , both low and high density, you can see their requirement when you click on a building and hover your mouse over this icon(green house with a star in it) : Level 1 residence requires Education gained from an Elementary school. Once you build a school and they finish their education occupants become educated. A high school provides better educated and Cims become well educated and a university provides the best education and Cims become highly educated.

Residential buildings both low and high density can go up to level 5. At each level you will see the hint when you hover over the upgrade icon. "Educate more citizens to allow the building to be upgraded..." Besides that hint there is also this one: "Increase the value of the land to allow the building to be upgraded..."

This will show you that in order for a residential building to upgrade it does not only need for it's residents to be educated it also requires services and access to Leisure activities like the parks and plazas. This coverage you can check by using the appropriate overview. Leisure for parks and plazas, Crime for police coverage, Fire Safety for fire department coverage and Health for health and death service coverage(you have to switch to the deathcare tab in the Health overview).

For a building to level it's not enough that the service building shows green area on the road on which the building stands, it requires for the building to show the color associated with the maximum coverage. Here is an example(notice that the building on the right side of the street shows up painted with a darker color, this indicates that it has less health service coverage then the building across the street which is painted with a brighter color):

One more thing...

Land value overview can be misleading. Here is why. When you take a look at this picture you will see the different colored areas white, blue and green. Where white = no land value, blue = low and green = high. Now this might lead you to think that in order for a residential building to be happy with it's land value you have to zone it in the green areas.

But that's the thing, the green areas are created by the residential buildings that are at high level. You only get bright green colored areas where multiple high level residential buildings overlap their influence on the land value. To put it simply, high level buildings create high land value, they don't level on it. They create it by leveling.



Commercial zones , both low and high density require all the same services and even parks like the residential areas

but they also need to have shoppers who are the appropriate wealth level if you want to level up your shops. Like this tool tip says:

And as you can see higher level commercial buildings need better educated Cims to work in them so you need an educated population for them to operate at high levels as well.

