Dozens of American cities are quietly surrendering financial control to state-appointed overseers — not through drama or headlines, but through the slow arithmetic of pension obligations, shrinking tax bases, and deferred decisions finally coming due. This week, we trace the infrastructure of municipal fiscal collapse: who actually holds the levers when a city can no longer govern itself, what gets cut first, and why the places it's happening are rarely the ones you'd expect. If last week's insurance story was about private markets quietly pricing out risk, this one is about public institutions quietly running out of road.