Why are US mid-tier cities so much cheaper than European equivalents

The thing you're not seeing is that Buffalo's price collapse was *structural*, not cyclical. I managed logistics for a distributor with a hub upstate in the 2000s. We could've placed it in Rochester or Buffalo for a quarter the cost of anywhere near Boston. But the reason those cities were cheap wasn't just "population loss made land available"—it was that the local supply chains had already hollowed out. No reason for workers to bid up rents if there's no coherent job market drawing them in. Lyon's rents stayed sticky because France kept manufacturing and regional supply chains intact, even if they're not what they were. The institutional infrastructure—port connections, logistics hubs, skilled labor pools tied to specific industries—that stuff doesn't dissolve instantly when decline starts. It holds the floor on demand. Buffalo's supply chains actually *left* though. The port operations simplified, regional distribution contracts consolidated elsewhere. Once that disappears, you don't just get cheaper housing. You get cheaper housing that stays cheap because there's no coordinating reason for young workers to consolidate there. It's not investment capital looking elsewhere. It's that the actual *reasons* people needed to be in that city evaporated, and nobody's rebuilt them yet. Your Buffalo redevelopment is real but watch what it actually does. If it's just lofts and restaurants for remote workers, rents will pop for a few years then stabilize low again. The price only holds if there's an actual node of economic activity that forces coordination—a distribution center, a manufacturing cluster, research facilities that pull in talent that needs housing. Zoning and regulation matter in Lyon, sure. But the deeper difference is that someone's still there moving goods and making things.

I think you're conflating two different things here, which is why the sprawl explanation feels off. The question isn't really "why is Buffalo cheap" — it's "why is Lyon expensive." And those have different answers. Buffalo is cheap because it lost its job base and people left. That's demand destruction, full stop. You can build as much housing as you want, but if the regional economy isn't pulling people in, prices stay flat. We tried this in my last job — had an office in Rochester, NY, same dynamic. Housing was absurdly cheap relative to quality. But that's a local problem, not a zoning problem. Lyon's expensive for reasons that have almost nothing to do with zoning capacity or construction costs. It's expensive because France is capital-constrained on the margins — if you have money and want to live in a French city, you're picking between Paris, Lyon, Marseille, maybe Toulouse. The investment pool is smaller, the regulatory friction for new development is higher (you're right about that), but more importantly: people with means have fewer options and more restrictions on moving between countries. A Parisian investor buying a second place goes to Lyon or the Côte d'Azur. An equivalent American investor in NYC spreads to Buffalo, Austin, Denver, Miami. The geography of opportunity is way wider in the US, which actually keeps pressure on mid-tier cities, but it also means those mid-tier cities have to compete harder on fundamentals. Buffalo's revival isn't about zoning — it's about whether the jobs actually show up. That's the real constraint.