Why do you say that? Most small-to-medium US cities have a major housing crisis too, these places just have wildly different causes for their housing crisis than say, San Francisco, and therefore have wildly different metrics by which to evaluate the state of that crisis.
> High rents are a self-inflicted problem affecting a handful of metro areas with a minority of the population.
No, this is not true. High rents are affecting almost every metro in the US. You just won't see them if you "average" figures, because these metros don't earn average dollars. You can't average two crises into nothing.
(If your left lung is collapsed, and your right lung is overinflated to the point of bursting, you have two major crises on your hands. You can't say "well, everything is fine because on average my lungs have a healthy volume", that's accurate math, but not accurate to real life)
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A midwest average rental price of say $1500/month will seem cheap to folks in Seattle -- until they learn that incomes are over 50% lower here, so to anyone working in-market, a $1500/month rent price here is equally as expensive/painful as a $3000/month rental would be in Seattle. That's still a crisis, equal in pain/severity to a "superstar" city, but it won't show up in any "US average" figures, and can easily lead people to write ridiculously uninformed hot-takes.