Cities can be great places if the mayors are determined to keep them safe with tough law and order policies.
Otherwise—they turn into dangerous wastelands.
Most are a holdover from a time when we were a manufacturing powerhouse with waterways as our main transportation; unless they are a major port today, they can be replaced with office parks.
NJ’s biggest city is basically a transportation hub for trains and planes, with a large port - surrounded by a couple of hundred thousand dangerous, idle people. The offices downtown are a small segment of the larger city, and have a difficult job attracting talent; while they aren’t near many residential areas, the mutants go there to disrupt things because they know it is the only way to get publicity. Some areas destroyed in riots in 1967 weren’t even rebuilt; there is no reason to do so.