Mechanism
The myth of American abundance
Everyone assumes it's because America has more land, or looser zoning, or we just built more housing. None of that explains it. You can drive twenty minutes outside Lyon and find cheap land too. Hamburg's surrounded by countryside. The difference isn't land availability—it's that those European cities *retained density and stayed economically relevant*.
Cleveland and Buffalo didn't get cheap because we built too much. They got cheap because they lost their reason to exist. Steel mills closed, corporate headquarters consolidated to New York or Chicago, and white-collar jobs never filled the gap. When a city's economic function disappears, price collapses—that's not a zoning story, it's a demand story. Lyon and Hamburg stayed regional capitals. They have universities that matter, they have companies that want to locate there, people still *move to them*. You pay for that.
The actual driver is path dependency plus something we don't like to admit: American metros are much more winner-take-all than European ones. We let agglomeration concentrate ruthlessly. Paris sucks talent from every other French city; same with London and the UK. But at least those countries have *enough* second cities pulling weight. We poured everything into maybe six metros and let the rest hollow out. Hamburg's still expensive because Germany deliberately maintains Ruhr Valley and Stuttgart and Munich as genuine alternatives. We treated Cleveland as disposable. The cheap housing isn't a feature—it's a symptom of a city we decided wasn't worth investing in. That's the part people miss.
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I spent five years moving food through regional distribution networks, and I've got to push back here. The demand story is real, but it doesn't actually explain the price gap you're observing.
Take the Midwest corridor I knew—Indianapolis, Columbus, Cincinnati. All three lost manufacturing. None of them stayed regional capitals in the way you're describing. But Indianapolis didn't stay cheap the way Cleveland did. It rebuilt around logistics and pharma. Prices didn't collapse. Columbus got state government plus Ohio State plus tech companies trickling in. It held value. Cincinnati lost more than both of them and it's still more expensive than Cleveland. The pattern isn't "lose your function, collapse forever." It's "what you physically still move through the city."
The difference between Hamburg and Cleveland isn't just that Germany invested in the Ruhr. It's that Hamburg's the port. It *has* to keep moving things. That's not an alternative city—that's physics. Goods move through it whether the city feels economically vital or not. Cleveland? We decided the mills were obsolete and stopped routing cargo through there. The cheap housing is partly demand, sure, but it's also that once you stop being a chokepoint in any supply chain, you stop capturing the rents that keep prices sticky. European cities have tighter rail networks, more competing ports, more reasons why stuff *has to flow through your specific place*. It's harder to route around them.
I'm not saying intentional investment doesn't matter. But I think you're underweighting the physical infrastructure piece—the paths that goods and people actually have to use, versus the ones we decided we'd find alternatives to.
This nails the actual problem, which is that we're confusing a symptom with a solution. The cheap housing in Cleveland *is* the outcome—not the cause—of decades of disinvestment, and treating it like some kind of abundance story masks what's really happened.
I've watched this play out in water systems specifically. A shrinking city's pipes and treatment plants were sized for 500,000 people. Now there's 300,000 left, but the infrastructure costs are mostly fixed. You've got a water main rated for demand that'll never come back, a treatment plant oversized and expensive to operate, and a tax base that's halved. So the remaining people pay more per gallon than they would in a growing city—and the city can't afford to replace aging assets. Cleveland's water infrastructure is held together by patch jobs because the economics stopped making sense thirty years ago. That's not a housing abundance story; that's a city in managed decline, and the infrastructure decay mirrors the economic hollowing out.
The path-dependent part you're pointing at—that's the thing that matters. We *chose* this. Germany's regional policy literally prevented this kind of concentration collapse. We didn't. So when someone points at Cleveland and says "see, housing abundance," they're not seeing that cheap housing is what happens when you've already lost. The real question isn't why Cleveland's cheap—it's why we thought letting that happen was acceptable policy.