> Yakuza to thank for that
Your pithy one-liner isn't very enlightening. Could you elaborate?
Democracy tends towards chaos and deadlock. There are too many cooks, and they all want different things, and they all have roughly the same amount of power. Usually nothing happens, and when something does happen it's a half-assed designed-by-committee nightmare.
When you see government acting swiftly, purposefully, effectively and succeeding at something difficult and expensive, it's because an autocratic force (like a political machine, or organized crime) has bent the democratic process to its will.
For example, only Mayor Daley could have pulled off Millenium Park in Chicago. To get something like that done in Chicago's dysfunctional government, you need to own people at every level and in every department. Only the Daleys have built empires on that scale, and other mayors in other cities don't wield nearly as much power (even if their legal entitlements are the same).