Mid-size American cities are hollowed out by design, not accident

How much of this is actually baked into zoning codes versus just the fact that European cities got denser *before* cars made sprawl feasible at scale? I'm skeptical that planning codes alone kept Lyon's center alive when the economic incentives were pointing the other way. We had zoning in America too—it just zoned for sprawl instead of density. But I'm wondering if that's the cause or the symptom. Did Hamburg's planning codes prevent people from leaving, or did Hamburg's economy not crater hard enough to make leaving attractive in the first place? Because I've seen plenty of mid-size European cities that are visibly struggling even with restrictive zoning, they just lose people to Berlin or Paris instead of to suburbs.

This framing gets at something real about regulatory permission structures, but I'd push back on the determinism a bit. The zoning story is correct as far as it goes—American cities got legal tools to sprawl that European cities didn't have—but that explains *capability*, not necessarily *inevitability*. Buffalo and Rochester didn't just sprawl because they *could*. They sprawled because the economics made it rational given the specific constraints they faced. Here's what I mean: a developer in Buffalo in 1955 could build a house in the suburbs or retrofit a dense walkup. The walkup required navigating century-old infrastructure (water, sewer, electrical) under existing buildings, working with fragmented ownership, managing tenants during construction. The suburban lot meant cheap land, no existing constraints, a clear timeline. The code permitted both, but only one penciled out financially. Now, that's partly because American cities subsidized car infrastructure in ways European ones didn't, so yes—policy shaped incentives. But you can't retrofit away that cost gap just by changing zoning; you have to change what the infrastructure actually supports and how it's financed. That's a much longer, slower adjustment than the post suggests. The real question isn't why Cleveland sprawled given the tools it had. It's why those tools existed in the first place, and whether changing them now actually reverses the hollowing without simultaneously pricing out whoever's left. I'd want to know what's actually happening in cities that *have* tightened zoning in the last decade—not theoretical capacity, but actual development patterns and who moved where.

The zoning piece is real, but I'd push back on the framing slightly. It's not just that European cities "didn't get permission" to sprawl—it's that they made different tradeoffs on parking and setback requirements that made sprawl physically expensive. When you require underground parking (Amsterdam, Munich) or genuinely restrict lot coverage, you price out single-family suburban development at scale. That's a choice, enforced through code. In Cleveland or Buffalo, the real lever was that we *permitted* low-density development on cheap land outside the city limits, then let municipalities compete for tax base. Once you allow that, the math solves itself—a developer can build a strip mall in Shaker Heights for less than assembling and building dense in the core. But that's not destiny; it's a specific set of zoning decisions and municipal fragmentation. I spent three years on a mixed-use redevelopment in Buffalo that kept getting tanked by height limits and parking minimums that were written in the 1960s and never revisited. Nobody sat down and said "let's kill the center." It was just a thousand small code decisions that, together, made it uneconomical to build there. The scary part is the path dependency works both ways. Once the housing stock thins out and commercial anchors leave, you get regulatory capture in reverse—the remaining residents don't want change, the city loses tax revenue for infrastructure, things actually do decline. But that's a solvable problem if you rewrite the ordinances. Lyon didn't prevent sprawl through magic; it prevented sprawl through explicit constraint. We chose not to.

This assumes the regulatory constraint was sufficient, but I'd want to know: when German and French cities faced their own industrial transitions—and they did, especially in the 80s and 90s—what actually kept people there? Was it the density codes, or was it that those metros had other economic anchors that American mid-size cities lost? Hamburg's got a port. Lyon's got pharma, biotech, a research corridor. Cleveland lost the mills and... what was supposed to replace them? I'm asking genuinely. Because if the mechanism is "codes forced density so the center couldn't die," that only works if there's something drawing people to that center. Mandatory density in a city with no jobs or institutions is just mandatory density near nothing. The zoning story is real—I've seen what single-family codes do to potential infill. But it feels like the post is treating regulatory permission to sprawl as the *cause* when it might be more like the *permission structure* that lets you react to an economic shock the way you're already inclined to. Did German cities stay dense because they couldn't sprawl, or because their economic cores stayed valuable enough that staying dense made sense? Those lead to very different policy conclusions.