Baltimore, where the mayor recently got caught taking thinly disguised payoffs, deserves consideration.

I was thinking of Baltimore as well, but I think any large enough city is corrupt in some manner or form. Others that come immediately to mind: Philadelphia, Boston, New Orleans, and Detroit.

I'd say New Orleans. But they've cleaned up a lot since Katrina. Old New Orleans was a good first or second place.

Houston is in the odd situation where I wouldn't really call them corrupt. Instead they are random and chaotic. There is pretty much zero organization or planning in this city. So everything is done how the last little guy wanted it. No two sections of road have the same style. Signs are placed at random. No zoning so construction is random. For two years all the street lights were timed and planned together. In the morning traffic flowed in and at night it flowed out with amazing organization. And then we got a new mayor and now the lights have random timing again. We built a train that initially went from the football stadium to a hospital. A few years later someone extended it on both ends so it went from high density residential to high density commercial and now you can't get a seat on the thing. And you can't pay to ride it either, all the ticket machines are broken and have been for years. In a sense Houston is a libertarian paradise. Everyone does their own thing and there is zero central planning.

I would go with Chicago and Baltimore as the two prime examples. New York has a level of corruption that doesn't quite rise to Chicago-level, although de Blasio is doing his damnedest. And yes, New Orleans has cleaned up a lot of its act since Katrina, although some of the old influences are starting to creep back in. Birmingham has somewhat recovered from a high level of corruption between about 1995 and 2010. St. Louis, I'm not sure what to make of it; if the government there is highly corrupt or just massively incompetent. At some point, it amounts to the same thing.

Chicago has gone downhill. When the Daley machine was running things, the city was corrupt, but functional. The Daleys, Richard J. and Richard M., did not want to use their mayoralties as stepping stones to state-wide or national jobs, but were content being mayors of Chicago.

Under the Daleys the streets were swept, crime was kept under some semblance of control, and the garbage was picked up. Chicago under the Daleys was the cleanest large city in America - rubbish-wise. The city was still corrupt, but it was livable; the corrupto-crats did their day jobs.

Now, Chicago is a steaming cesspool of corruption and incompetence. And it will only get worse under its new identity politics mayor.

I forgot about Baltimore, though I mainly know it through its fictionalized representation in The Wire.

How would you like to be the hack that has to spin that shit snack for a living? I'd question how much his money his soul is worth to lie like that but I'm pretty sure he has no soul to speak of.

Meanwhile, Manhattan makes a pitch to be included in the discussion.

Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance spent nearly $250,000 over the past five years from a state asset forfeiture fund on fine dining, first-class airfare, and luxurious hotels, according to public records obtained by The City, a nonprofit news outlet in New York City.

https://reason.com/blog/2019/04/04/manhattan-da-spent-250k-in-asset-forfeit

BaltiMOAR sees your feeble attempt, Manhattan, and raises.

Another day, another rock kicked over, and another pile of apparent corruption is unearthed in Baltimore, Maryland. This time, a prominent businessman in Charm City has just now “remembered” that he donated $100,000 to then-mayoral candidate Catherine Pugh’s Healthy Holly book company in 2016. In exchange for this, he received one copy of the book.

https://hotair.com/archives/2019/04/04/bookgate-expands-another-100k-baltimore-mayors-pockets/

What? no mentions of Washington DC.
It's city corruption is almost to Baltimore's level, but then if you add in all the imported Fed crookedness and I'd say it goes above Chicago's.

> if you add in all the imported
> Fed crookedness and I'd say it
> goes above Chicago's.

True, but it would be a category error. I mean, the corruption of Chicago is (perhaps) distinctively American. The wretchedness of DC threatens the human project.

Not entirely kidding! In context after context, the world is developing problems for which the United States, at her best, has and would provide the finest solutions, if not the most flattering ones.

But the budgets and enthusiasms which make miracles happen are choked by shame rent-seekers.

Atlanta will tell you there are no "chop shops" in the area, but if you have a desirable vehicle in one of the outdoor parking lots downtown it may go missing and get stripped.
When it does, no one will tell you when it is recovered, because daily storage charges are pure profit. They wait until the next business day to put a notice in snail mail, so, IF your vehicle is recovered, you'll be on the hook for $600+ in storage fees.

There is ONE "non-consent" towing service used by APD, and they don't care about telling you they have your car, not at all.

It's a much smaller city, but Flint, Michigan should be in the running. E.g., a few years ago, one of the city council persons was caught trying to pawn a city-issued laptop. He was re-elected, and then the council appointed him the City _Treasurer_.

Not to mention the whole thing where they neglected their water infrastructure for nearly 50 years and got taxpayers in the rest of the state to pay for repairs because they were so pathetic. Their plan in case something happened with the water from Detroit was always to temporarily use the Flint River. Every year, they filed a report saying that they'd switched to the river for a few hours and it worked fine. Then "something" happened - bankruptcy plus Detroit demanding they start making up for a decade of unpaid bills, or the water would be shut off - and it turned out that not only had they lost the equipment needed to compensate for the polluted river water (it's much cleaner than when they used it in the 1960's, but still not clean enough), they didn't even have a chlorinator to prevent infectious diseases from spreading through the water pipes.

Oh the street lamps are on in Chicago tonight,
And lovers are gazing at stars.
The stores are all closin’
And Daley is Dozin’
And the fat man is counting the cars.

Well there’s more cars than places to put ‘em, he said.
But I’ve got room for them all!”
So round them up boys,
‘Cause I want some more toys.
Hit the lot by the grocery store.

Steve Goodman
“The Lincoln Park Pirates”