[vitus]

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.)

[perl4ever]

>Are you making a point about Columbus

Not really, I was fishing for context, for whether someone who says we need small cities considers Columbus small, large, or negligible.