> I don't believe there is a nefarious scheme in play.
I don't either but I do see it a sad lack of imagination and resignation to out-of-date mythologies about individualism.
There's no defensible reason why work-home-school-retail structures rural places can't nucleate closer together into walkable "main street" towns.
Much of the design of fly-over states is dictated by developers. It starts when a farmer who wants to retires sells a huge tract of land to a development company. The land eventually gets populated with a mind-numbing matrix of boring mcmansions, without regard to utilities, tax base, schooling, or distance.
People then buy into to the facade of rural living but then end up driving 10's of miles for each and every errand and activity. They even take vacations in Europe and marvel at how delightful it is to sit in a town square and be able to walk to everything. When they get back to their ex-burban strip mall hellscapes in the USA, the vast majority just fail to make the connection that it doesn't have to be that way.
There's no defensible reason why work-home-school-retail structures rural places can't nucleate closer together into walkable "main street" towns.
Much of the design of fly-over states is dictated by developers. It starts when a farmer who wants to retires sells a huge tract of land to a development company. The land eventually gets populated with a mind-numbing matrix of boring mcmansions, without regard to utilities, tax base, schooling, or distance.
People then buy into to the facade of rural living but then end up driving 10's of miles for each and every errand and activity. They even take vacations in Europe and marvel at how delightful it is to sit in a town square and be able to walk to everything. When they get back to their ex-burban strip mall hellscapes in the USA, the vast majority just fail to make the connection that it doesn't have to be that way.