As housing prices rise, people need to borrow more to purchase a home and with more ability to borrow, people can bid up the prices of housing. So one place to look for a metro/regional distinction might be housing prices.
While there is clearly a difference in the absolute level of housing prices in cities and regional areas, over the long sweep, movements in housing prices in the regions have pretty much kept up with those in capital cities (Graph 7). This graph shows an index of housing prices for each of the states broken down into capital city and rest of the state.