SimCity 3000: Planning for Future Growth

This is a continuation of my thoughts on a post elsewhere about Farms in the Game SimCity 3000.

One of the things I do in SimCity 3000 in the early game is build some farms not far from the downtown expecting to convert it to heavy industry at some point after the city has grown. In game mechanic terms, I can put things like police stations and jails (different from the Prison) in the middle where the tiles will die when it converts to industry because it's too far from a road. 

So there may be ways to plan to convert some things relatively painlessly as you get more development and move away from subsistence farming. 

A real world example that I read about on Reddit but didn't bookmark:

The US has a lot of storage businesses on the outskirts of town because it's a cheap business to run. You don't need a lot of employees or infrastructure and the simple storage buildings (big sheds with multiple sections so they can tent thfm out) are cheap to build and cheap to tear down when you want to replace them with something else.

In many cases, most of the development on the property will have no temperature control, no running water, etc. You may or may not have a light inside the unit. It's a very basic room with a door you can lock and the customer frequently needs to supply their own lock.

You need one employee in the office during daylight hours. The facility is fenced and you need to be let in a secured gate during the hours you are allowed access, which varies depending on policies of the specific business. 

You mostly find these on the edge of town where there's not much development and land values are low. So it's a bet that the town will grow, it makes some money currently but it has low overhead and minimal need for the owner to do much handscon and the hope is there will be a big future payoff when the city grows and land values go up. Then you sell the land for a lot more than you paid for it.

"Green field development " -- building new stuff on empty land -- is relatively cheap and easy. In-fill development -- putting new stuff on the few remaining empty parcels in a town -- is generally harder and more expensive and I mostly don't see discussion of practices like making a storage business to have something currently useful that is easily abandoned and upgraded if land values go up or conditions otherwise change. 

That kind of information would be extremely useful for communities to have for planning for growth. Maybe it exists and I just don't know where to find it, but having spent years on Cyburbia, the oldest planning forum on the internet, I kind of suspect that information mostly isn't available anywhere. 

There must be PEOPLE who know something about it or I wouldn't have seen a Reddit discussion about that aspect of storage units, but it's not information I've seen discussed in planning circles and I did attend a conference for professional planners once in addition to hanging out with them online for some years.

That's the sort of information that I'm interested in and which I try to connect to planning stuff where possible.