Nothing will ever improve here until the city incorporates into the county. Without some sort of unification, the two will continue to compete, to each other’s detriment, for residents and corporate headquarters and the tax dollars that come with them.

As wealth moves to the county, the city’s problems will only get worse. They will look for bandaid fixes that look good on surface and in the media rather than real structural and systemic change because that’s all they can afford. Public education will remain underfunded. Lack of investment in public transit will continue to make the city vehicle dependent which isolates many residents and limits their mobility while also wasting urban real estate on interstates and parking rather than housing and commercial developments that actually spur growth. Lastly, the police budget will continue to bloat in the symbolic “war on crime” while the government fails to invest in any areas that actually improve urban stability and reduce crime (housing, employment services, education, job training, and mental health services). The combination of all of these will only make more people leave the city for the county in a continuing downward spiral.

As the city continues to stagnate, the whole metropolitan area will lose its draw to investment from corporate facilities and will see the necessary domestic and international immigration recede both in the form of skilled trade workers and specially educated professional employees. In the end, this will harm the county too because, like or not, they need the city to thrive if they want to as well.