City planning certainly isn't my area of expertise. I think it's a fiendishly hard problem. For a small town to draw people in and thrive, it needs:
1. Jobs.
2. Good K-12 schools.
3. Some amount of things to do and cultural amenities.
Remote work can help a lot with #1. I think people are fairly tolerant of a lack of #3 and it's a thing that can grow organically over time. People will also accept fewer things to do if the area is quieter, they can afford bigger homes, and there's more outdoorsy stuff nearby.
But #2 is really hard. You need a strong tax base to fund it, which small towns don't have. They are sort of trapped in a death spiral where if they had more people coming in, they could have better schools with the increased tax base, but they don't, so they can't, so no one moves there.
City planning certainly isn't my area of expertise. I think it's a fiendishly hard problem. For a small town to draw people in and thrive, it needs:
1. Jobs.
2. Good K-12 schools.
3. Some amount of things to do and cultural amenities.
Remote work can help a lot with #1. I think people are fairly tolerant of a lack of #3 and it's a thing that can grow organically over time. People will also accept fewer things to do if the area is quieter, they can afford bigger homes, and there's more outdoorsy stuff nearby.
But #2 is really hard. You need a strong tax base to fund it, which small towns don't have. They are sort of trapped in a death spiral where if they had more people coming in, they could have better schools with the increased tax base, but they don't, so they can't, so no one moves there.