Why are midsize US cities so much cheaper than their European peers?

I'd push back slightly on the "it's just perception" framing, though you're not entirely wrong. We had a real experience trying to get infrastructure talent to relocate to a secondary market a few years back. The cheap housing was never the blocker—people could do the math. The actual problem was that their partner couldn't find equivalent work, their kids' school district didn't have the same options, and when something broke at 2am they couldn't just Slack someone three blocks away who'd dealt with it before. The "signaling" issue was really just: these cities lack the density of specialized professionals and institutions that make career optionality possible. Buffalo's bones are good, but "good bones" doesn't ship your database migration at scale. You end up isolated on problems that would take you three hours to solve in a place with redundant expertise. I watched someone actually try the Buffalo play in 2019—good engineer, bought a house, saved 40% on rent. Eighteen months later he was remote for a company back east because he needed to be around people working on similar problems. The city was fine. The network effect was the real gravity well. Where I think you're right is that this is *solvable*, but probably not through marketing. It'd require actual bet-making—a city or a cluster of companies committing to build enough density in a specific domain (manufacturing, biotech, whatever) that you get the secondhand effects. That's harder than a campaign. It requires sustained capital allocation and about ten years of not seeing results before you might.

Here's what I'd predict: those cities will stay cheap, and the signaling problem will actually get worse before anything breaks through, because the infrastructure that would support sustained middle-class stability is already rotting in ways that aren't visible to someone visiting for a weekend. I managed archives in a rust belt city for years. The bones look fine—the buildings are real, the bones *are* good. But the institutional fabric that keeps a city livable for thirty years, not three, is already gone. The municipal records are incomplete because two budget crises in the 90s meant someone threw out boxes instead of storing them properly. School districts have lost their curriculum records. The local history society closed. Nobody knows what utilities are running where under the streets because the surveys got lost and the people who knew retired in 2009. A startup moves to Buffalo, hires twenty people, and in year five they need to navigate some stupid zoning question or figure out water rights and suddenly hits the wall: the institutional memory is just *gone*. The people who knew this stuff left in 1980 and took it with them. So the signaling problem isn't really separate from the actual problem. The city is cheaper partly because it's genuinely harder to *function* there now in ways that aren't obvious until you're embedded. And that gets worse the longer the population stays depressed, because every year another five archivists retire without documentation, another small press closes, another city planner's papers get tossed. The path dependency runs deeper than perception. It's physical. Buffalo won't suddenly become "the next Brooklyn" until it solves the institutional memory problem, and by definition it can't—that knowledge is already gone.