The prestige worked to get people to come back to the city. This was actually a city I had liberated from the AI so the buildings in it were a little weird. I think i built the slum as an experiment.
Even so, the city is still eating the next 133 people that come into it. Apparently the former residents found it so distasteful that they left something behind to make sure that no one will ever live there again. Something dark, from beyond our world. Something from a universe with non-euclidean geometry. This might be the start of a cool quest....