I miss the early 2010's cultural cachet of the mid-sized city

This might be a niche lamentation but 10 years ago the mid sized (50k-250k) US city saw a great increase in its cultural standing. The whole "eat local" trend brought quality restaurants to urban areas that were scheduled to be turned into parking lots in 1999, and rents were so low, both commercially and residentially, that young people could live there for a pittance and small businesses could take risks knowing there was a group of people with discretionary income to buy weird shit.

Now we've seen commercial real estate bought up by big out of town firms and more rentals converted to single family homes without building adequate replacement housing, so rents have skyrocketed in both directions. As a result young people are having the option of paying high rent in a small city or high rent in a big city, and they're making the obvious choice to move to bigger cities.

Obviously the natural progression over the course of American history has been that young people who can afford to move to LA, NY, Chicago, most often do so, but it feels like it's happening at a much higher frequency, and the pop culture landscape seems to reinforce an all or nothing mentality when it comes to urban living. If a rapper doesn't wear your baseball team's logo on a hat, who gives a fuck. And that sucks because there's a lot of advantages to building out small cities culturally, especially where young people can afford to actually buy a house and save money for retirement (!!!).

I don't really know how to fix this, I'm not an economist, but it just sucks because I felt like the small city of the early '10's really let people build all sorts of culturally valuable things that have since been outpriced or moved out.