I can't source it right this second, but in an interview, the show runners said they based Korra's setting on the 1920s US, simply because they thought it would look cool, which is.... Horrid world building.
Unfortunately the writers are big ol' libs and they absolutely were trying to set Legend of Korra in a mix between '20s New York and Hong Kong, leaning more toward the New York side of things really. I mean there's a giant green full-body statue out in the bay, it's literally just new york
This is why I don't get why liberals treat fiction like it's divinely inspired. Like analogs and references to real world things in Harry Potter aren't a result of J.K. Rowling's ideology, they're just self-evidently correct divinely inspired metaphors. In their mind, J.K. Rowling isn't inventing a setting purely from her own knowledge and biases, the liberal becomes immersed in the fiction and unconsciously accepts the text as Rowling merely reporting on truths of this world the way she observes. They don't read it critically as a world created entirely from her imagination, because it gently confirms their biases