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Comment by hunterb123 | Hacker News Reader

Small towns in the US already work similarly to European towns, though a bit more straightforward (pun intended).

The town itself is pretty self-sufficient, usually has a co-op, general store, single main road going through downtown, sidewalks, etc.

Larger cities do have suburbs like you're describing, but generally they do have their own amenities like fast food courts / grocery stores / school systems near the entrances of the housing developments, the commuting is generally only because of work, which hopefully we can make more remote to ease traffic for physical workers.

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...and that's kinda what's missing in the US (and large parts of Southern Ontario) right now: small towns. Instead, you have bedroom communities that depend on an urban centre to make them work at all. No, not everywhere, but in too much of the populous parts of the country. It's gotten to the point that people just expect that that's just how things work. It made a certain basic sense, I suppose, with the GI Bill and the Levittowns it spawned post-WW2, but that should have been a very temporary solution to a baby boom housing crisis, not the permanent state of things. I grew up in a town with a population of about 1500 people, and we had two grocers, each with an actual butcher who not only cut meats, but made their own sausages, etc. Could you get fresh weirdo herbs that only grow halfway up Vesuvius in years that end in a 7? No, but we weren't missing anything anybody would actually miss either. (And if you want a really nice artisanal bread, make it - there are very few things that are easier, and autolysis means you don't have to spend hours working at it, you just wait.)

There's plenty of small towns, just takes moving there. I prefer them.

Remote work should make them more viable, before you could either just farm or mine.

Industrial period nearly killed small towns as people flocked to the city for factory work.

I've lived in multiple small towns in America and the reality is the nice central amenities are too expensive for most working people, and at least half of the storefronts are boarded up, which means most people end up driving to the Walmart. The majority of people that do use the centrally located boutiques drive in from their homes which aren't in the center. Most new construction doesn't even include sidewalks or crosswalks, making walking dangerous even if you wanted to.

There's at least one, but not more than a few, exceptions in each state (Asheville, NC for example) where people move in with their money to larp "small town living" but it depends on outside capital to work and the original residents end up getting priced out.

>but generally they do have their own amenities like fast food courts / grocery stores / school systems

Though some starkly do not. Before the pandemic, a friend was living in a San Diego area suburb apartment building that was located on a strip of land between freeways with the complex and a strip mall.

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