Earlier quoted context omitted.
You seem to be confusing small towns for suburban sprawl. Small towns don't have the problems you list: build a massive McMansion on the edge of town you are still walking distance to the other edge of the town. The whole value of your house will be more than a tiny house in San Francisco despite having 10x the floor area and 100x the land. Hiways have been good for rural areas overall, because the few people who liv…
Actually OP is more right than even he knows, because the small towns themselves should never have been built but for massive federal government land subsidies for railroads in the 19th century - huge sections of which were never sustainable even when built, let alone a century later.
Interesting argument, but I'm not sure if it is correct. In the 19th century farms didn't have tractors so they had to be much smaller. Thus there were more farmers, and so more towns were needed to support the farms. The railroad helped things along, but many of them were built without federal land subsidies. The farther east you go the more likely the railroads were built without federal subsidies.