How the Verified-Town Directory Is Built
The directory launched with 1,718 verified towns across 48 states. This is how they got there.
Stage by stage
The pipeline begins with the universe of American places — every incorporated municipality and Census-designated place in the 50 states — and narrows it in stages, each one writing its results back to a single national dataset:
- Gazetteer import. Census Gazetteer files establish identity: name, GEOID, coordinates, land area.
- Population import. Population Estimates and ACS fill in who lives there; only the 1,000–5,000 band continues.
- Demographics. ACS 5-year tables add housing, income, age, households, and education, with per-field completeness tracking so missing data is visible rather than silently zero.
- Candidate evaluation. Each place is screened and scored on affordability, regional access, population fit, and completeness.
- Routed regional access. OSRM computes the driving route to each town’s nearest regional center; anything over 60 minutes is out.
- Walkability. A 15-minute walkshed from each town center over the real street network, scored for destinations, connectivity, and compactness, then normalized nationally.
- Settlement independence. Urban-area boundaries and commuting-flow classifications separate free-standing towns from absorbed suburbs.
- Publication validation. Before export, every public surface — directory, detail pages, sitemap, state pages, map markers — must contain exactly the same set of GEOIDs, with no duplicates and no gaps.
The gates in numbers
The current national run: 1,718 towns passed every gate. Validation confirms zero qualifying towns missing from the directory, zero nonqualifying entries, zero duplicate paths, and zero mismatches between the directory, the sitemap, and the map. Eleven towns are missing income data and 135 have partial housing fields; their profiles say so explicitly instead of hiding it.
What verification does not mean
Verification means the data is consistent, complete enough to publish, and passed the published screen. It does not mean the town is good, welcoming, or right for you. The dataset is a map — a good one, we think — but the territory still has to be walked. Read the methodology for the full rule set, and when you find a town worth arguing about, go see it.