Why are mid-size US cities so absurdly cheaper than European peers

I'd push back slightly on the parking minimums being the main lever here, though you're right they're real. We built out some mixed-use stuff in a mid-Atlantic city around 2015, and yeah, the parking requirement added maybe 15-20% to total project cost. Brutal. But it didn't actually determine whether the project penciled or not—it was already a marginal deal because there just wasn't enough rent-paying demand to justify the land cost plus construction. The demand-side anchor you mentioned is the real thing. I think you're describing it in terms of wealth networks, which is true, but there's a more immediate version: European cities have actual legal/planning constraints on what can be built and where, which creates permanent scarcity and rent floors. Buffalo doesn't have that. Buffalo also has no regulatory friction stopping someone from building a 200-unit apartment complex on the edge of town for cheap, which means the entire local market gets priced to that marginal project, not to scarcity. The comparison to Lyon only works if you imagine someone could build aggressively at Lyon's periphery without massive planning battles—they can't. So rents stay tethered to the city-center price. Cleveland's don't. I think you're genuinely unsure because the answer's both, but in a specific order: supply elasticity destroys demand-side pricing power in US mid-size cities. Paris can charge London prices partly because it's dense and desirable, but mostly because you physically can't build your way out of it. Buffalo can't hold prices because it can.

I'd push back on the capital network effect thing. Montreal's what, 200km from Toronto, and it doesn't follow the Paris-London pattern at all—rents there have stayed comparatively sane even as Toronto went absolutely insane. Same with Vancouver and Calgary. So it's not just "proximity to a dominant city makes housing expensive." There's something else. The parking minimums argument is real but I think you're maybe underweighting how much of this is just that European cities stopped letting developers build much of anything in the 80s and 90s. Supply constraint does real work. Buffalo didn't get cheaper because demand moved elsewhere—it got cheaper because you could still build there. Lyon got expensive partly because you *can't* build much in central Lyon anymore. The restricted supply in European city centers keeps prices high even with lower baseline demand. It's less "wealthy people want to live here" and more "there are only 500 apartments available and they're all expensive." The demand-side vs supply-side framing might be backwards. I'd bet it's mostly supply-side, but inverted from what you'd expect—demand in Buffalo is low because you can easily build cheap housing elsewhere in the Buffalo metro, so there's no constraint pushing prices up. Whereas in Lyon you're constrained no matter what. Same total demand, but different elasticity of supply.

The parking minimum thing is real but I'd push back on the demand-side framing—it's more tangled than that. I spent two years working with a county in upstate New York trying to figure out why new multifamily construction kept stalling even when developers theoretically had financing. The parking codes mattered, sure. But the actual binding constraint was water and sewer capacity, and the municipal finance structure made it economically irrational to expand that capacity for housing that wouldn't generate enough tax revenue to service the bonds. A mid-size European city can spread infrastructure costs across a national system that's already built out and consolidated. Lyon's water authority serves millions. In rural Ohio or upstate New York, you've got fifty fragmented municipalities, each one running its own treatment plant, each one trying to avoid debt. When a developer wants to build 200 units in Cleveland, the city has to decide whether to upgrade pump stations and treatment capacity. That capital cost gets passed directly to rents because there's no regional pooling. Buffalo's cheap because it doesn't have the *ability* to absorb much new demand without massive public investment, which voters won't fund. It's not that no one wants to move there—it's that moving more people there would require the city to borrow heavily on its own weak credit. The demand-side story makes it sound like the problem is preference. It's actually that the financial and technical scaffolding doesn't exist to make building cheap *and* feasible.

You're conflating a few separate things here and I think that's keeping you from the actual mechanism. The parking minimum stuff is real—I've seen those per-unit costs run $15-25k depending on local land values and whether you're doing structured or surface. That absolutely gets capitalized into rents. But here's the thing: if parking minimums were the binding constraint on mid-size US cities, you'd see rents drop materially in places that eliminated them. Minneapolis eliminated single-family zoning in 2020. Rents didn't collapse. Portland has relaxed parking requirements for years. The housing shortage there got worse, not better. So parking's a cost, but it's not explaining the Europe gap. What you're actually describing with the "network effect to London/Paris" is real, but it's demand-side in a specific way: it's not that wealthy people don't want to live in Buffalo. It's that there's no institution or employer with the wage premium to justify paying Buffalo rents relative to what developers can actually build for. A mid-tier engineering firm in Lyon can hire at a salary that makes sense because there's an implicit floor set by what people earn in Paris. Cleveland has no equivalent gravity well. You'd need either a major employer relocating in, or you'd need to accept that mid-size cities just stay cheaper because that's the actual equilibrium price for what the local market can bear. Which one are you asking about?