My intuition wants to say, "If a town can spring up around a company, can't the town wind down if the company shuts down?" Two reasons why that's wrong come to

My intuition wants to say, "If a town can spring up around a company, can't the town wind down if the company shuts down?" Two reasons why that's wrong come to mind (maybe one reason, they're closely related): - The people who made the town chose to move there. The people who close up shop are "forced" to leave. - The kinds of people who move to a town are "special" -- they probably take more initiative than most, they probably have smaller direct families, they're younger. Existing town occupants better reflect wider society. That second point makes me think about cults :-). I can't remember where I heard it, but someone told me that cults have a lot of trouble with the second generation. Their parents are obviously the sorts of people who join cults, but their kids revert back to the mean and have some common sense. If one in ten is the sort of person who might pick up and settle elsewhere, well, you can make a town with that if there's something to draw people there. If that draw dies down, though, maybe one in ten will have no trouble leaving and the rest will have more difficulty. I wonder, though -- US internal migration is trending downward pretty steadily. You'd think it'd go up as barriers to moving have come down... Maybe this is America slowly reverting to the global mean after being a bunch of adventurous immigrants who picked up and left somewhere else.