A huge problem in many major cities is that the city government becomes an end unto itself. City workers often are the largest group of middle class voters, so politicians must pander to them to gain their support for campaigns and elections. Once government exists primarily to serve itself, you're screwed.
All the problems described by the author pale in comparison to the over-promising of pensions, and the long-term insolvency of many of those cities. It is politically impossible to engage in pension reform, so services will get worse even while taxes increase, just to pay for the pensions and not anger city employees.
It's a mess Democrats created, and they're going to have to be the ones to fix it.
Your analysis pretty much nails it. The Mayor of Pittsburgh, a city of 330,000, is basically chosen by 20,000 public employee union members voting in the Democrat Primary (GOP does not even bother to field a candidate 9 times out of 10). Hence his loyalty is to a small cadre of union members and not to the population as a whole.
The one counterexample I can think of is Detroit, where bankruptcy got them off the hook for a lot of these pension costs. This freed-up money for them to do things like turn the streetlights back on and demolish abandoned buildings. So much of Detroit has gone back to green space that perhaps one day conservative homesteaders could establish themselves there.
Well put.