Surely, it's less straightforward than that: Government drove a lot of slumclearance, while taxes generated by private wealth paid for sewers, vaccines and antibiotics.
The transfer of power to Washington started with slumclearance during the Depression when the federal government began relocating the poor to more concentrated enclaves of public housing where they were denied ownership of the economy they once had built to support themselves however modestly.
High-profile prosecutions of former local-government officials are a sign that there will no longer be official tolerance of the kind of corruption that was so blatant in Casablanca, where funds allocated for slumclearance and other projects in the 1990s were diverted into private pockets.