The controversy around Jason Aldean’s “Try that in a Small Town” got me thinking. What are some things that you wish you could do in a small town that you just can’t?
I was in the mountains, Hendersonville NC I think, trying to find a place to eat after 7 pm on a week day. Was impossible.
Can we define a small town? The ones in his video have populations of around 150k which I would argue isn’t a small town. That’s a little over the combined population of seven counties were I live or about 165% of the combined population of all 11 “major cities” in the Eastern Kentucky Coalfields. I say anything much over 10k in population doesn’t qualify as a small town.
Small town should be <10k and not part of urban sprawl
It would be nice if it were that simple, but a lot of “small towns” have a few tens of thousands of people but are located in a sprawling, rural area.
That’s a suburb.
No, suburbs are towns surrounding cities. It’s not a suburb if there is no city around.
Sprawl is a city term in my experience.
New York is vertical. 5 bouroughs, one city.
Los Angeles is sprawl. Hundreds of “little” cities in Los Angeles County that all combine to ‘make’ L.A.
When people think of sprawl, yes, they think of urban sprawl. But semi-rural towns can sprawl quite a lot, I assure you. Go drive through Oregon and you will see.
Been a while, but Los Angeles is orders of magnitude different.
Imagine if the area between Salem, Eugene, and the coast was all strip mall, subdivisions, gated communities, golf cousres, malls, city parks, freeways, etc.
That is urban sprawl.
And the San Diego version is only 40 miles away.
My hometown had a population of 120. My current town is around 800. Anything bigger might as well be a city to me lol
Did you have any stop lights? I had some friends I met in college who had come from a town that didn’t have any stoplights, and they sure struggled.
Neither town had stoplights, but all the shopping was done in a town that did, so we didn’t struggle too much.