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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

Here's the thing. We already have towns spread everywhere--just like in pretty much every country in the world. The US is a large country. I live in an exurban town that's adjacent to a couple of older/smaller manufacturing cities within an hour of a major tech metropolis (though my office is actually much closer). I have septic, pay for water, pay for trash pickup, etc. And, not that I object (as I go into the city a fair bit), but a lot of my taxes seem to go into urban infrastructure projects.

It's not black and white. It's not central Manhattan and the middle of Montana.

[ADDED: And, by the way, my town was founded in 1653. It's not some recent suburban sprawl addition.]

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This. There are all kinds of rural US towns with existing infrastructure that are slipping beneath the waves because there aren't any jobs. Not everyone wants to live in Manhattan - if I could telecommute from a more rural location I would.

The town I live in is in pretty good shape because it's on the outer ring of the Boston commuting radius--with pretty good rail. Plus until quite recently essentially all Boston tech was west of the city anyway.

But this idea that, if only we herded everyone into cities and stopped spending on other infrastructure, everything would be great is... silly.

New England, and indeed much of the East Coast, is a far cry from the rest of the country. The width of the entire state of Massachusetts is smaller than the distance between some neighboring towns in the Midwest.

Yes, but the point remains that all those spread-out towns already exist. Unless they're actually abandoned we're not going to bulldoze them.

The difference is that they're not within daily/weekly commuting distances of tech centers as are many of the outlying areas of most tech centers--the Bay Area being something of an exception. So living there would be true remote working as opposed to just not living in a desired city core.

Massacheusetts is almost 200 miles wide, I'm having a little bit of trouble picturing places that are that far removed from the nearest town outside of places like the empty parts of Nevada or Wyoming.

I guess it depends on your definition of "nearest town". By the official "settlement hierarchy", in which a thousand souls or more comprise a town, that's true. Once you get into 20k or 30k, though, it's pretty easy to find places in the West or Midwest that are more than 200 miles from the nearest town of that size.

There's a pretty wide gap between "1k" and "20k".

Also I don't have any GIS tools handy but I started poking around with google maps and 200 miles is a long way even in the west, It looks like all of Nebraska is within 200 miles of a 20k city, and so is almost all of Texas except maybe down by Big Bend.

>There's a pretty wide gap between "1k" and "20k".

That's true. I was a little surprised 1k is large enough to be considered a town.

this idea that, if only we herded everyone into cities and stopped spending on other infrastructure, everything would be great is... silly.

As the person who started this thread, I agree, that idea that nobody argued for is indeed silly. All I said is that small towns are inefficient for the typical citizen. Nobody claimed that eliminating small towns would make "everything great".

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