Expanding the city's boundaries so that the suburbs have to pay for the cities? Wow. What's in it for the suburbs?
How about the cities and their denizens figuring out how to fix themselves? As in cleaning up those cities crime issues to make them more attractive to businesses? Gentrification has its evils, I agree, but few people mention how unsafe pre-gentrified areas typically were. High crime rates discourage businesses other than liquor stores and 7-11 convenience stores. Lack of business means lack of jobs. Which in turns means more poverty. It seems like a circular issue, but it has to start with providing a safe environment for business to flourish first. Business will not flourish in the midst of high crime and mayhem.
Once a safer environment is provided, restaurants, boutiques and all sort of businesses can flourish and attract customers from the suburbs who bring their money to the city. That is the way the suburbs can support the city. Not by arbitrarily redrawing city's boundaries to forcibly take money from the suburbs.
I'm not in favor of annexing the suburbs (Memphis tried it and is starting to reverse the changes because providing services to the burbs wound up costing more than they anticipated), but at the same time, there's something to be said for forcing suburbs to chip in to help a city that they're essentially mooching off of. In Baltimore and other urban areas, cities serve as hubs for transportation, culture, business, and a host of other services and amenities without which the surrounding suburbs mostly wouldn't exist - or at least wouldn't exist in their current form. But many of these areas (Baltimore included) have a long history of folks abandoning the urban core, taking their tax revenue to separate municipalities, while continue to avail themselves of the benefits of the city for which they're no longer paying.
Here in Baltimore, we have JHU & Peabody, Hopkins hospital, the casino, the Inner Harbor, Fort McHenry, the BMA and other museums, the symphony, the aquarium, Camden Yards, M&T Bank Stadium, Pimlico, Royal Farms Arena, concert venues and several nightlife enclaves - all within the city. The suburbs are mostly just strip malls, office parks, and housing developments, which is fine for going to work and going to sleep, but there's not much interesting to do out there outside of hiking. Nobody's building a world-class aquarium in White Marsh or a baseball stadium in Owings Mills. Folks still come into the city for all of those big city amenities, while themselves contributing to the disparity that they blame the city for not being able to correct.
Then, when the city tries to do something to improve itself, like securing several hundred million dollars in outside funding to build a new subway line, the Republican governor pulls the plug and lets it all goes to waste and diverts the state funding to building more highways in the suburbs.
