In these "rest of the country" places, you can't have a meaningful conversation about housing problems, because the residents will point to the suburbs/exurbs and say "those are still affordable -- that's where the middle class should go". Which is a better situation than say San Francisco, but it's still bad -- it's generating even more sprawl and further kills public transit (as this article highlights).
New dense urban construction in small Midwest cities is close-to-identical (within 10-15%) to top ten market pricing, even though wages are still 20-40% lower on average, and construction costs + land costs are lower. Small and medium sized Midwest cities cut themselves off at their own feet, building lots of "urban" housing that's priced identically to places like Seattle / Portland / Denver. They then act really surprised/frustrated when working class people complain about housing costs and gentrification in their "low cost of living" cities.
A $300k housing unit in "the rest of the country" is often just as unaffordable as say, a $600k housing unit in Seattle, if you measure that cost in terms of percent of paycheck -- which is what working class people rent/purchase housing with.