Why are mid-size American cities so cheap compared to European equivalents

The tax story is real but it's not the missing piece—it's more like the mechanism that makes zoning stick. In Germany, property taxes are low but they're assessed on *use*, not just land value. You can't sit on a parcel in Hamburg's core and wait for appreciation. France has similar structures. That said, I'd push back on the claim that sprawl just "happens" less in Europe. What actually happens is that sprawl *costs* more to service, and those costs get passed back to developers and residents earlier. A 1990s suburban development outside Lyon still needs sewers, roads, utilities—but the municipality can't deficit-finance that infrastructure the way Columbus or Charlotte could. You end up pricing exurban land at something closer to its actual carrying cost. That changes the math on whether to build there at all. In Cleveland, I watched a developer build a greenfield warehouse outside the city proper where the land cost $0.40/sf and infrastructure was "free" because it'd been subsidized 20 years prior. That same footprint in an exurb of a European city of similar size would've been $2-3/sf plus developer contributions to roads and utilities. The zoning permissiveness matters, sure, but it only matters *because* the infrastructure cost structure allows the cheap sprawl to work economically. The population loss in US industrial cities is real, but I'd ask: was that loss a cause or a symptom of the cheap-land-everywhere regime? Once you can build a Home Depot at the edge for nothing, why would retail stay downtown? The causality might run both directions in a way that makes the pure zoning explanation cleaner than what actually happened.

You're on something, but I'd separate "zoning allows bad sprawl" from "zoning prevents scarcity." They're related but not the same thing, and the second part matters more than you're letting on. Bad density doesn't keep land cheap—it keeps *central land* cheap while shifting value outward. That six-story block next to a parking lot in Cleveland doesn't suppress downtown prices because of the bad urban form. It suppresses them because there's literally nothing forcing anyone to be downtown. You can get equivalent space twenty minutes out, near a highway, with parking, and it'll cost less because there's no artificial constraint on supply. The zoning doesn't create elasticity sideways—it *permits* it, which is different. European cities have zoning too, they just can't sprawl because the geography and planning rules make sprawl actually hard, not just slightly less profitable. The tax policy piece you're asking about is probably the real missing variable though. European property taxes and development fees tier heavily toward density and against holding land vacant. So even if Cleveland *could* sprawl easier, the fiscal incentive structure would punish a landowner for doing it. Here, a parking lot generates enough revenue to sit there forever. We've basically built a system where doing nothing is a better investment than building. That's not zoning—that's incentive alignment. The zoning just makes it possible.

I'd push back on the "bad density" framing, because I've watched what happens when you actually try to constrain sprawl without fixing the underlying incentives. In the early 2000s, Portland had one of the strictest urban growth boundaries in the country—genuinely limiting outward expansion. Housing prices climbed, sure. But what you got wasn't denser, more vibrant neighborhoods. You got a bunch of single-family zoning that never changed, lots of teardown-rebuild cycles, and eventually a homelessness problem that made the affordability gains vanish anyway. The difference between Cleveland and Lyon might be simpler and more depressing: it's not that sprawl is *allowed* in Cleveland, it's that sprawl is what people with money *did*, and the tax base followed them. Lyon kept its middle and upper-middle class because you literally can't as easily move them 30 miles out. But that wasn't about zoning elegance—it was about physical constraint forcing captive demand. When I was doing code work in the Midwest, the real issue wasn't that bad development was permitted. It was that once the flight happened, the municipal bond ratings tanked, maintenance budgets got cut, schools declined, and suddenly the core became undesirable in ways that no zoning reform fixes. You're then competing with suburbs that have brand-new infrastructure and no accumulated deferred maintenance. The tax systems probably matter more than you're crediting—property tax on land in Germany and France is structured very differently—but I'm skeptical that zoning constraints *by themselves* held European cities together when American ones fell apart. They might've just been along for the ride.

I'd push back on the sprawl-as-villain framing here. I worked on code compliance and land-use projects in the Midwest for years, and the places that actually *didn't* sprawl as much—like parts of Gary, Indiana or inner-ring suburbs of Detroit—didn't end up with valuable urban cores. They ended up abandoned. The real difference I'd point to isn't zoning flexibility per se, it's that European cities had **pre-automobile street patterns with higher minimum densities already locked in**. Lyon's medieval street grid and six-story building codes aren't flexible—they're the opposite. They made it impossible to build surface parking lots or car-oriented retail, so the city stayed walkable and dense by force of law. Cleveland could theoretically build dense, but the streetcar-era neighborhoods are already established in their low-rise patterns, and retrofitting them is harder and more expensive than building new cheap land at the edge. Also, I'm not sure the tax systems penalize sprawl in Europe the way you're implying. Hamburg's Elbe suburbs are expensive partly because of scarcity, but also because German property taxes are lower than American ones and they've been stable for decades. Cleveland's property tax volatility and foreclosure-driven land dumps actually *created* cheap land, not the other way around. A downtown lot worth $30k is cheap because of a decade of tax delinquencies and municipal fiscal crisis, not because someone could theoretically build a parking lot nearby. What tax policy or regulatory mechanism are you looking at when you say the European ones "penalize sprawl" more? That part feels underspecified.