Even within the Rust Belt, Cleveland is an outlier in that it’s decline was more recent and steep than the rest of the region. Cities like Pittsburgh and Buffalo started to decline in the 70s and bottomed out in the mid-2000s, but Cleveland sort of double-dipped in that the decline actually accelerated through the financial crisis and is only now starting to bottom out.

A lot of what I’ll call “third tier” cities (Cleveland, Boise, Reno, etc.) are facing housing shortages precisely because a lot of people were priced out of larger cities. So housing shortages are popping up in those places as well, driving up home prices dramatically. I know at least one of those cities where the average price of a 2br house jumped from $300k to $600k in 5 years.

As usual, the problems are NIMBYs and restrictive zoning with a heavy preference for single-family homes. But moving to smaller, cheaper cities is only a short-term solution. The long-term solution is to build more, denser housing.

The median listing price in Boise is $349,900 (https://www.zillow.com/boise-id/home-values/); Reno, $438,250 (https://www.zillow.com/reno-nv/home-values/; median selling price, $356,700). Cleveland's median listing price is $82,500.

Reno's listing price $231/ft^2 up from $151/ft^2 five years ago, but keep in mind that Reno was rather badly hit by 2008: median sales prices for 2br homes peaked at about $284,000 in 2006, bottomed at about $75,000 in 2011, and are currently back up to $271,000 (https://www.trulia.com/real_estate/Reno-Nevada/market-trends...).

Thanks for that — I was off on the exact numbers, but I think the trend still holds true because those market fluctuations happened nationwide. People in smaller cities want to preserve that “small city” way of life, which makes it harder to build affordable housing to handle the influx of “economic refugees”. There’s enough tolerance for remote work that locality of employers is not as strong of an effect on housing prices as it used to be, which makes smaller cities really attractive.

It’s a problem that will get worse before it gets better, and the cities that can figure out how to provide housing that someone working minimum wage can afford will be the winners.

Moving elsewhere would be entirely dependent on if I could secure full remote as there's just no way I can leave my current salary or I'd be making minimum wage in another city.

Why would you be making minimum wage in another city with 5-7 years IT experience? People in this thread are trying to tell you that someone with your experience can find a job and own a house in many other parts of the country.