Are you making a point about Columbus (the biggest city in the 7th most populous state in the country) that I'm missing?
MSAs can sometimes be rather small in area -- for instance, the Bay Area is split into 9 MSAs, all but one of which (SF-Oakland-Berkeley) are less populous than the Columbus MSA. So, everyone in the South Bay lives in a MSA smaller than Columbus (San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara).
If instead, say, you opted to take all CSAs with > 1 million people (per the 2020 census), you'd cover just over 2/3 of the population.
(Even so, affordability isn't purely a function of city size. Chicago is eminently more affordable than DC or SF despite being larger than either, whether you consider the CSA, MSA, or just the urban core.)
MSAs can sometimes be rather small in area -- for instance, the Bay Area is split into 9 MSAs, all but one of which (SF-Oakland-Berkeley) are less populous than the Columbus MSA. So, everyone in the South Bay lives in a MSA smaller than Columbus (San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara).
If instead, say, you opted to take all CSAs with > 1 million people (per the 2020 census), you'd cover just over 2/3 of the population.
(Even so, affordability isn't purely a function of city size. Chicago is eminently more affordable than DC or SF despite being larger than either, whether you consider the CSA, MSA, or just the urban core.)