I think a large part of why we're not attracting or keeping new players is that there's nothing to see, aside from text. My thought is to change the way things look.
The city is a good place to start. Change the background to an image of a city. Highlight different parts to represent the different districts. Rearrange the links so they make sense and eliminate some of the useless ones. Just by using Google, I got a couple good ideas:
Overlay the names of the city on the image that ends up being the background. Use the mastery of hover-text to tell players what's in each district. Maybe draw some lines on it to show which district is which or give each one a different color shade. Maybe put the tag for the gang that owns that district on some of the imagery in the hover-text.
Yes, this would make it so you have to actually go into the district to use it, but it wouldn't be that many more steps, and I think this would make people more likely to stay.