Mechanism
The real reason these cities stayed cheap
Most people blame "deindustrialization" or "population loss" as though those are root causes rather than symptoms. They're not. The actual difference is zoning and what it permits.
Compare Cleveland to Lyon. Both lost manufacturing. Both have similar populations (around 300-400k proper city). But Lyon's center is dense—six, seven stories is normal, you see real neighborhood retail on the ground floor, the metro works. The whole place rewards being in the core. Cleveland's inner ring is zoned single-family all the way out. You can't build a modest apartment building in most of Tremont or Little Italy without a variance. That's not accidental; it's policy from the 1920s-50s that never got unwound. Hamburg's similar—dense, mixed-use allowed as the default, so demand actually bids up land values.
When you kill the allowed uses in your center, capital doesn't stay. It doesn't "move to the suburbs"—it leaves the region. Buffalo's cheaper than Strasbourg not because of some regional economic inevitability but because you literally cannot legally build the housing product that would absorb demand from professionals who might want to live there. Strasbourg had postwar reconstruction and different zoning norms. Buffalo had urban renewal that demolished walkable blocks and then zoned against replacement. That specific policy choice, decades old, still prices the whole city as disposable. The recovery doesn't happen because the zoning that locked in the cheap single-family character never got revisited. And by the time anyone notices, it's not a shortage problem anymore—it's a "why would anyone move here" problem.
It's frustrating to keep seeing this framed as regional decline when it's mostly municipal self-inflicted wounds that nobody wants to actually fix.
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I'd push back slightly on the "nobody wants to fix it" part, because I've watched this play out in a mid-size city near where I grew up, and the resistance isn't just apathy—it's genuinely organized. When the city council actually tried to relax single-family zoning a few years back, the pushback from existing homeowners was loud and immediate. People had bought in those neighborhoods specifically *because* they were zoned that way, and they saw any densification as a direct threat to their property value. And look, they're not wrong that their equity was partly *protected* by that policy. You can't unwind that without making people feel like you're taking something from them, even if the region as a whole loses.
That said, your point about the allowed uses is right in a way that cuts deeper than I think most density advocates acknowledge. It's not just that zoning keeps things cheap—it's that it keeps them cheap *and immobile*. You get trapped in this weird equilibrium where the housing is affordable but there's no economic reason for new people to come, so the affordability doesn't actually help anyone. We tried renting in Buffalo for a project once and this hit different than other "cheap cities" I've lived in. The deals were real, but the feeling was hollow. The infrastructure and the built environment just weren't there to make the affordability *desirable*.
Strasbourg vs Buffalo is a clean comparison though. Makes me wonder how much of what we call "rust belt decline" is actually just zoning that locked in the wrong urban form at the moment the region most needed to be flexible.
This lands, but I'd push back on one thing: zoning is real and it matters, but it's usually a symptom of an earlier decision to treat a city as a solved problem. You see this in infrastructure too.
Cleveland's single-family zoning wasn't arbitrary 1920s suburban ideology (though that's part of it)—it was the planning equivalent of "we've peaked, now optimize for stability." Once a city decides it's not going to grow anymore, you zone to prevent the conflicts that growth creates. Vacant lots become liabilities instead of opportunities. A six-story building that could work in a growing market looks like downside risk to a city council that expects to shrink. So you lock it down. Then decades pass and the assumption calcifies.
The thing that's changed recently is that people finally stopped assuming decline was destiny. But zoning revision is still treated like crisis management rather than just... updating your city's operating manual. You get pushback not because of ideology but because someone bought property in 1995 when "this neighborhood stays residential forever" was the promise, and now that promise is the law. Which isn't wrong exactly, it's just sticky. The frustrating part isn't that cities *can't* fix this—it's that they wait until they're desperate to even try, by which point you've lost fifteen years of compounding that could've been different.
You're right that zoning is doing real work here, but I'd push back slightly on the "capital leaves the region" framing. I think you're describing something narrower and more interesting than that sounds.
The thing is, capital will sit in cheap land for a long time if the fundamentals are there. What zoning actually kills isn't the region's ability to attract capital—it's the *feedback loop* that turns proximity into value. Lyon works because a developer can build a six-story mixed-use building, rent it profitably, and that success attracts another developer to the block next to it. Zoning doesn't just prevent the building; it prevents the cascade. Cleveland's got the metro, the universities, the hospital anchor tenants, whatever. But if the only legal product is detached houses on lots, then yeah, a professional taking a job downtown is choosing between commuting from the suburbs or leaving Ohio. And once that's the choice set, you're not really competing with Lyon anymore—you're competing with the suburbs, which have better schools by reputation and lower density.
The frustration is justified, though maybe not for the reason you're stating. The cities that didn't unwind this stuff didn't fail because they lacked demand or regional fundamentals. They failed because they made a specific, reversible choice look inevitable. The annoying part is that reversing it is actually possible—you can change zoning—but it requires either a crisis severe enough that nobody can pretend the current policy is working, or someone willing to absorb the homeowner blowback. Buffalo's had the first condition for thirty years. That it hasn't moved suggests the second part is harder than the policy itself.
I'd push back slightly on the framing, though the zoning piece is real. In my last job I worked with a real estate dev who tried to do exactly this—modest five-story mixed-use in a secondary city's walkable area. The zoning technically allowed it after they got a variance. But the financing still wouldn't pencil because the comparable rents weren't there. You can change the law, but you can't actually force demand to materialize just by making supply legal.
The thing is, zoning *matters*, but it's more like a necessary condition than a sufficient one. Lyon and Hamburg benefited from that density zoning *and* also being in regions where people and capital had reasons to stay—proximity to other metros, university presence, specific industries that didn't evaporate. When I look at places that actually reversed course, like parts of Providence or Jersey City, the zoning change was one input but you also needed someone with enough conviction (and capital) to build the thing at a loss initially, betting that use would follow. That's rare.
The frustrating part is that the author's right that it's fixable policy—you *could* change Cleveland's zoning tomorrow. But changing zoning in a city where no developer thinks there's money to be made is just rearranging the legal framework around a problem that's partially but not entirely about law. It's necessary but not sufficient, and I think framing it as the root cause lets a lot of other regional dynamics off the hook.