What’s the maximum population that you would say still qualifies as a small town?
- 1000
- 10,000
- 50,000
- 100,000
- Over 100,000
0 voters
What’s the maximum population that you would say still qualifies as a small town?
0 voters
I would say 100,000 is a small city.
50,000 a large town.
1000 is not even a town but a village or something.
But coming from the densest state in the Union might affect how I think about these things.
For me, somethong like 3000 would be a Small town. Large town would be 10000 to 15000. City in the 25k.
I grew up in small town Arkansas. We had just over 1000.
I see what you did there
My father-in-law has a cottage outside a town with about 6500 year-round residents, but the surrounding area blooms to about 35000 during the summer. The town is big enough to have a Wal-mart and Home Depot, but only one high school. Definitely small town feeling. The next town of that size is almost an hour away, 90 minutes from a city of 100k+, so it’s definitely rural.
To me, the term “small town” is relative. Compared to Mayberry or Lake Wobegon, someplace with ten or twenty thousand people is a big town or a small city. But it could definitely feel like a small town to someone from a big metropolitan community.
I didn’t vote, because this is really hard to answer given where people live today. For example, I live in a township which doesn’t have a town at all, population less than 30,000. The adjacent city (“towns” don’t existing in Michigan) that shares our name (without “township” in its name) is less than 10,000. I regard it as a small town, and it’s a large reason why I chose to live here. Except, it’s a small town that’s part of a huge urban megalopolis.
Is it really a small town because it has a charming downtown and a small population within its political border, or is it just a piece of a giant metropolitan area? Would the answer change if our state government took away our autonomy and forced us into a larger agglomeration like New York City or Toronto? Is the East Village a small town although it’s part of NYC? Is Port Credit a small town even though it’s been sucked into Toronto’s government?
I think I need to drive an hour before I can even begin to consider whether the population within a political limit constitutes a small town or not.
10,000 is about right to me. When I hear “town”, despite the fact it has a technical definition in some places, I picture something with a downtown area. An area of 1,000 might have one, but might not, and an area of 50,000 would either be a large town or a small city,
Of course, if it is difficult to determine where your town ends and where its suburbs begin or another community begins, or if your “downtown area” is actually a metro area several miles away, the question becomes more complicated.
I said 10k but for me it would be more like 5k. I say this because I live in a city of 12k. There’s a neighboring township we share a school district with that is 11k. As a council member in this city of 12k I know how hard it is to connect with the bulk of residents. Even living here for 43 years I feel like there’s so many people I don’t know. People sure as heck don’t know who I am. They might know my name from seeing yard signs every 4 years but they don’t know my face.
If we only had 5k it would be much easier to “know” everyone.
And I grew up in a village with almost exactly 10,000 people which blended in with another community of almost exactly 10,000 people. It feels right to call just the village a small town, but the two taken together a large town. That’s because in my book, in order to graduate to a small city, you need a bus system. At least I haven’t spent more than a week or so in a place I would consider a city that didn’t have one. On the other hand, I have no idea what to make of Breckenridge, CO, which has a bus system but is only 5,000 strong.
I’m not going to vote because I really don’t know what I would consider a “small town” and I’m not sure population has much to do with it. I tend to think it has more to do with the “feel” of the place - does it have a walkable downtown by which I mean does it have an area where stores and doctor’s offices and other businesses are located ? I don’t necessarily mean that everyone in town is in walking distance of the downtown area, but rather, that once a person has driven downtown, it’s possible to park the car once and run multiple errands. That’s different from a place where you can’t really walk at all because because the only way to get between two adjacent stores is to drive out of one parking lot to the street and then drive into the second store’s parking lot , or where going to two locations “across the street” from each other might involve crossing a six-lane road with no traffic lights nearby.
But assuming population matters , I have no idea what population would constitute a “small town”. My neighborhood has over 50K residents in a little over a square mile so I’m probably a bit of an outlier but it seems weird to say my neighborhood has too many people to be a “small town”.
Obviously YMMV but I think in the Australian context the distinction between a village or hamlet and a small town is that a town has all the facilities. It has a town hall, a bank, a club, a post office, a primary and a secondary school, an outlet for government services, a service station, a hospital/hospice, a cemetery. It’s the smallest urban centre you could move to and retire. You can conduct all of modern life’s functions there though there may be a substantial lack of choice or quality. Population 1,000 maybe less for a locality in decline.
I live in a census-designated area with 4,000 people year round that balloons to 8,000 people during the tourist season. It has two gas stations, a grocery store, a hardware store, and numerous eating establishments. It’s not a town since it has no mayor and no municipal government. I suppose you could call it a village. So it’s not a small town, it’s a medium-sized village. Based on that, a small town would be 10,000 people.
My home town is still under 2000 officially.
Last time I was back, still no cell service.
I like it.
Small towns often have most of their population near a center but the area of the town large enough to hold half orote sparsely located residents.
50,000 is kind of high but 20 to 30 thousand is still reasonable.
I picked 50,000 because 10,000 just seems like nothing to me! Though I live in one of the most densely populated zip codes in the US (more than 125,000 people per square mile) so 50,000 in a whole town seems tiny.
I picked 10k as the maximum, but generally consider a ‘small town’ to be between 4k to 6k or so. Largely influenced by small mountain towns I lived and worked in in Colorado, such as Leadville and Salida. But mostly the upper end of the stated range. Just big enough to have a few national chains, say a McDonalds and/or Walmart, but not much more.
I have spent most of my life in the Southwest though, so ‘big’ cities to me = Denver, which doesn’t really compare to the coastal megaplexes.
Around here “town” does not mean “municipal built-up area surrounded by less built-up countryside”. A town is basically a sub-county. All the counties are broken up into towns the same way the state is broken up into counties. (The exception is CITIES. A City is not a town nor is it within a town). Towns contains villages and hamlets which are more like what folks in many other states probably think of as towns, with a downtown shopping area and reduced speed limits, a denser population and more built up and surrounded by areas between that are more suburban and less commerical.
Our town, North Hempstead, has 237,000 people in it, an impressively large one. I put 50,000 as the limit of “small town”. If you’d asked “small village” I’d have said 5000. The nearby village of East Williston (which is in the Town of North Hempstead) is quite a bit below that, with 2550 people. The village I live in, New Hyde Park, on the other hand, has nearly 10,000 people in it (and is also inside the Town of North Hempstead).
(I’ve been living on this island too long, haven’t I?)
Places that are so heavily oriented towards short-time visitors always have more of an infrastructure than their permanent population would suggest.
I did not answer the poll, because all of this is legally defined with technical thresholds where I live. The physical structure of our municipalities is also pretty different from the American standard, which means the poll’s assumptions are not aligned with my area.
Here, villages, towns, and cities are organized in a sort of “satellite” or “hub-and-spoke” system. Typically, you have a town (pop. 500 to 3000) which is surrounded by some number of villages (pop. 200 to 500), usually four to six. The villages themselves might or might not have some number of what you might call hamlets (pop. up to 200) attached. And then you have the cities (pop. greater than 3000), each of which is surrounded by three to five towns, which then have their own villages etc.
This structural arrangement is both traditional and functional. On the traditional side, it represents a continuing echo of the footprint of how people organized themselves over the last few hundred years. Everything from the hamlet to the town was in relatively easy walking distance, and represented the practical unit of day-to-day life, with regular access to local markets and services. Then from town to city was a full day’s walk (or less if you could afford a horse), and represented a workable connection for merchants and legal authorities, but which most people didn’t bother with on any sort of regularity.
Nowadays, this structure is used to define legal responsibilities for government services at various levels. No village has its own school, for example; this is a duty assigned to the town, which is required to build and administer one or two schools to serve the people of the town and the surrounding villages (a responsibility which then rolls up to the city, where there is one). Where you have several towns in proximity, they operate as a communal authority for the purpose of delivering utility services like garbage collection.
When I was back in the US, I would probably have said a “small town” is around 3000-5000 people, give or take. But these small towns can sit out in the countryside, all by themselves, with nothing around them. That kind of arrangement is very uncommon here. So my perception, and my vocabulary, has shifted.