Manhattan has 500K fewer people than the greater KC MSA and there's only one Manhattan but uncountable number of cities across the country.

The marketing message might be that urban living is the only acceptable life choice solely because of the date of your birth (astrological reasoning) but apparently only a very small percentage of people are getting that message. Enough are, such that prices are out of control in the fad areas, but almost no one lives there on a nationwide basis so it doesn't matter as a national issue, which is why its not getting fixed.

A good analogy is every christmas season has "the toy" that is in insane demand that perhaps 95% of the population do not want, but the demands of an extremely vocal tiny minority always result in a human interest story on TV. Doesn't mean its important or a universal desire for all humanity, just means its good clickbait.

There's a luxury downtown apartment building a block from where I work that I acknowledge exists. Approximately 120 rental residents have gotten the message that urban is the only way to live and suburbs are passe and unstylish, and they pay five times my mortgage in rent for the "privilege". However, I live in a burb 20 miles away with an eighth of a million other people unwilling to pay five times more than our mortgage as apartment rent. And our schools are top of the line as opposed to the urban district being reported as worst in the nation. Similar, predictable street crime stats. And my burb doesn't have panhandlers lining the freeway ramps and homeless people pooping on the sidewalk, but somehow I survive the lack of those cultural attractions at my home.

>almost no one lives there on a nationwide basis

"About 1 in every 38 people living in the United States resides in New York City." [1] I wouldn't call that "almost no one".

>There's a luxury downtown apartment building a block from where I work that I acknowledge exists.

I wouldn't complain, if those "luxury" downtown apartments didn't exist, your nice little suburb would be more expensive, those people have got to live somewhere. "Luxury" is a meaningless buzzword that developers like to put on their marketing materials.

[1] https://www1.nyc.gov/site/planning/data-maps/nyc-population/...

You need to compare the size of the numbers. My eighth of a million person burb can adsorb 120 people from one luxury apartment without a peep. We have a little private college where 3000 people appear and disappear every year with barely a peep in the market. Of course there is a building boom downtown of exclusively luxury apartments, nothing under say $3K/month, plenty up to $5K or probably higher.

I earn a 95%th percentile income for my area. The only urban housing being built is for people paying 5x as much as my income. That is a very small fraction of the local population. If income were linear instead of exponential that would be less than 1% of the population can afford urban living, the other 99% will have to live in the burbs or somewhere other than urban areas. If someone earning five times my income were kicked out of their apartment, they'd likely be living in a place much nicer than my burb, not that its anything bad, but its probably only the 3rd wealthiest burb in the area. There would be effects in the border areas where 120 people would be pushed downwardly mobile thru all the neighborhoods.

Different strokes for different folks man. It's not the siren song of the marketer's pyrite that draws people to the cities (and I'd love to see your numbers considering the total population of Kansas is a quarter of nyc alone). Living in a tiny town 20+ miles from the city center honestly sounds like hell for me, and many of the people I know; we have no interest in ever starting a family, in owning a car, in restricting our options for food and culture, hell in some cases even home ownership. Clearly the opposite is the case for you and that's ok, just, don't pretend like you have some cosmic truth figured out.