[thriftwy]

Soviet housing worked by building a huge number of small and medium cities while trying to limit number of people moving into capital and other desirable cities.

Guess what? After collapse of communism, housing in small cities depreciate rapidly, while housing in capitals skyrocket. There's much many more small cities than there's economic demand for, hence not enough jobs in those.

EDIT: Even when new factories are built by capital, they are usually not in small cities in the middle of nowhere with limited worker pool, but on outskirts of medium-to-large cities in comfortable distance of capital/large city (think Tesla Factory). This makes small cities unfit for anything other than eco-tourism.

Of course it applies more to large countries, since small ones (like Montenegro) just never had the quantities of population to form too many extra cities.