Your City Sucks! — Fixing Soft Systems To Rebuild Hard Infrastructure · by Seyi Fabode
Your City Sucks! is a provocative, practical examination of why American cities struggle—and how rebuilding trust can make better infrastructure possible.
What’s really broken
Streets, grids, pipes, and public spaces are the visible city. But underneath them sit the less visible systems—belonging, community, policy, and governance—that decide whether progress is possible.
Stop patching. Start diagnosing.
Belonging, trust, community, policy, and governance determine whether residents believe a city works for them.
When trust breaks down, building and maintaining power, water, transit, roads, and public space gets harder.
Assess what is failing, decide what to fix first, and rebuild the conditions that let infrastructure succeed.
Why this, why now
Seyi Fabode has lived in cities on three continents and worked in the “unsexy” systems that keep them running: power, water, grids, plants, and wastewater. In this two-minute message, he explains why the state of our relationships shapes the state of our infrastructure.
From someone thinking about city hall
The title challenged me. Then I couldn’t put the book down. While I was seriously considering a run for mayor, its framework brought the work into sharp focus: what to tackle, in what order, and why trust has to come first.
If you have skin in the city
City leaders deciding what to fix first.
Urbanists who want more than symptom-level answers.
Investors and operators working in essential infrastructure.
Residents who believe their city can work better.
Seyi Fabode's METRO Score ranks 332 US cities of 100,000+ people. None reaches Thriving, and Detroit scores lowest. See the full 2026 ranking.
The METRO Score is a 0–100 city health index created by Seyi Fabode, author of Your City Sucks!, built on 15 metrics and applied to 5,000 US cities.
Data center approvals by US city councils fell from 85% to 11% in four years, and opposition now spans 38 states. Seyi Fabode on what residents are really saying no to.
Civic intervention / the book is live
Diagnose the systems beneath the symptoms—and build a city people can trust, belong to, and believe in again.
What's your city's score? or get the book on Amazon ↗Hi, my name is Seyi Fabode, and this is kind of a two-part thing. The first one is to say thank you to all the people who supported the Kickstarter. The book is live. It's here. That's a copy. And the second thing is just to share a little bit more about why I wrote the book.
Um, I've lived in cities across the world on three continents and worked in the, what I like to call the unsexy part of cities: utilities, power, water.
And I've come to strongly believe that because of the broken trust, communities that are frayed, policy and governance that doesn't really serve the residents of the cities, it has become really difficult for us to build hard infrastructure.
My work has been in hard infrastructure, power grids, power plants, water systems, wastewater treatment.
And when you cannot get the residents of the city to believe that they belong to the city or that the city is serving them, it becomes really difficult for you as leaders in cities or investors to then invest in the hard transmission grid, water systems, and fix the potholes and the problems in cities.
So the book is about an active measure of how a city is working or not, what we can do, and collectively how we can bring our cities back to the state we want them to be, filled with love, belonging, community, and trust.
Um, I use the title Your City Sucks not because the people in the cities suck. We all don't suck. We're all awesome. But mainly because the vibe is off in our cities right now, and collectively I believe we can fix it.
So thanks for buying the book. Thanks for supporting Seyi Fabode.
