The "small town vibe" is what holds back the value. It's undesirable to modern young people to not have a vibrant creative atmosphere. Obviously this is a generalization but it's clearly true on average. That's bad for the town no matter which way you look at it -- top young talent leaves at first opportunity, so no companies invest because no ambitious talent pool, so no dollars flow through local economy, and it becomes a death spiral. Don't pretend like locals want this.

If the town has great real estate, someone should help it find its maximum value. Sure some locals will claim to dislike the change, sort of like those old SFers that complain about the good ol days of Haight Ashbury. But they did OK if they owned. And this is what capitalism is all about -- if it's empirically good, it gets bid up with higher prices.

To pretend like small towns have precious virtue on their own or want to shun value appreciation is naive.

Small town home owners should love to find out young people moved in and made their home worth millions. They can cash out and go hide somewhere forgotten if they really want. Either way, if they pretend they have some right to not have their land value improved, they misunderstand how capitalism in America works.

Your whole argument seems to be based on turning a small town into a big town... doesn't that defeat the whole purpose? Sure, the early adopters will make a profit on their property values, but then what? Do companies just keep hopping from town to town to keep this going, and what happens when they leave for the next hip place?

It is possible for small towns to grow an evolve while maintaining their culture. A small town doesn't need to become a tech hub full of hipsters to grow. Slow sustainable growth is what most of these towns want, not a massive boom and culture shock.

I grew up in a small town. Yes, I left right after high school and so did my sister, but she moved back once she had a family. A lot of people move to the city to start their career, make some money, and meet someone, then transition to a smaller town (or at least a suburb) once they have kids. This is an intentional choice. If the small town turned into a big one, they would likely look to leave and go somewhere else.

The place I grew up voted down a freeway proposed near town when I was in high school. They didn't even want faster access to a bigger city, because they were afraid of people working in those cities living in town and the impact that would have. I didn't agree with it, as I wanted a fast way out of there, but that's democracy. If a city, and it's people, want this to happen... ok. But a company deciding on its own that their way is the best way and changing the entire culture of a city by force is no better than one country invading another to try and impose their political structures as "best".

I moved to an area that was near freeways, but I still understand why some people don't like it. I kind of like the pace of small town life, but I want more job options, so I chose a larger area. Transforming a small town doesn't seem like it will solve anything. If I want the pace of a small town and that pace changes to bring in more job options, then it would no longer have that small town pace. The last place I lived had a lot of rules in place to keep it from feeling too "big". They had max building heights, didn't allow chains downtown, etc. I left for a few years and when I went back, a lot of that seemed to have changed. They are building giant condo complexes downtown, there are chains going in left and right, traffic is a mess. The place is worse and it lost the essence that made people want to be there in the first place.