I was gonna comment here in this thread but my comment turned into a suggestion of its own so I'm putting it here instead.

Districts are awesome, they allow for increased opportunities at virtually every level. More Godfathers, more profit, more strategy, etc. So rather than try to do away with districts, we need to solve the "problem" another way. Here's the problem as it's been presented:

• Most cities still act as one anyways even with the districts.
• For example Downtown and Blackbottom in most cases would be loyal because they are under the same city banner. This would be a completely different scenario if this would St.louis and New Orleans.

My suggestion was mentioned here and here as future feature developments, I just want to speak to their awesomeness. If we want cities to develop more individual identities, the best way is to cut off the influence of other cities. I'd recommend including a bit where changing home city requires x amount of hours for the dropoff to take effect, but otherwise I just wanna see an already-imagined and accepted feature come to life.

This

Great Suggestion Cato 

Bumping this because we need more city distribution. Make it harder to kill across cities so people aren't so fucking scared of being set up and then killed a month later. The bigger the stat-drop across distances, the better.