Kitana first told Rein and his group about how the city was governed. The current governor of the city was lazy and was only willing to do bare minimum work to keep the reputation of the city intact.
For that reason, most of the problems of the city were just supressed instead of being solved. The current governor had only a few years left in his duty as he was getting old, so he just did not care about the city anymore.
The people who were effected most by this were the people of the slums, whose living conditions had gone from bad to worse. But no one amongst the higher ups of the city cared about them at all.
Actually there were no slums in the city of Swevna just a decade ago. But the current governor had created this as an area to dump all the problematic individuals of the city who were troublesome to deal with.