It may well be the case for many towns that have lost their original economic anchor (local farming, mill, factory, fishing, etc.), don’t have a secondary anchor (tourism, bedroom-ism, alternate industry) and don’t have other qualities that make living there worthwhile (local college/U, exceptional environment, etc.)
If a town in the stretch of a midwestern or southern state used to be the soybean capital and is now all Con-Agra megafarms, I can see it becoming little more than a slightly extended regional company headquarters, with no real future for anyone who isn’t a C-A employee.
The tiny town I mentioned was on the cusp of disaster: all the businesses closed except for a convenience store (which took over the lumber company’s old building) and the post office. Then new houses started going up at ~$350K per. In comparison, the big split level ranch we had is worth about half that.
In fact, the town I was in that started me thinking is one that’s a county seat, but is sort of just outside the Greater Houston orbit. On doing some research, its biggest employers are the local school district (2x the number of employees of the next biggest employer, which is the county government which employs marginally more than the combined total of the oilfield employers in the area, which in turn employ slightly more than the local hospital.
It strikes me that having most people employed by public institutions probably has a weird economic effect since economies aren’t perpetual motion machines, and without some sort of cash-generating industry, they’re probably more reliant on external cash flows like state money than anything else.