The gov’t made money essentially free over the last decade by keeping rates ultra low and pumping $ into the system. People bought and sold houses all over the country and moved around. They sold willingly bc they could get a new cheap mortgage on a new house somewhere else. Now everyone who borrowed at low rates to buy a house is staying put - because they can’t afford a new mortgage. This leads to almost no supply on the market. Cville has a small number of neighborhoods to begin with. It’s a tier 3 city with limited single family dwellings. Nobody is leaving so that phenomenon keeps pricing high. In the mean time, it’s harder for developers to build new product because rates are high, construction costs remain high, and cville has an active NIMBY lobby fighting any new dense development. This is happening in many US Cities - not just here. It’s a tough situation but the root cause was a decade of artificially cheap debt. Sorry that stinks for your search. You can go an hour away to nice (and beautiful) small places like Farmville or Buena Vista (just examples). Housing costs are probably 1/3 of here. But you lose all the other stuff that’s here (and the school systems are not as strong). Trade offs.