Subreddits for any location go completely against the grain of reddit. The point of a subreddit is to group people with a similar interest, but the people who live in a city don't have that shared interest, they're just in the same place. Even on the bigger side, you end up with this cross section of the entire site, shrunk down and fragmented so that it's too big to ignore the inevitable arguments between the different factions, but also too small for the moderation to be any good.

Since the concept of a city subreddit is so obviously pointless, the only people who stay are the ones who like the conflict, exacerbating the problem; or in worse cases like the Canada subreddit, there is a hostile takeover by one side. If you want to talk to people who happen to live nearby, I think you should do so on a different website; reddit doesn't work at all for that usecase.