Methodology

How Townsteading screens, scores, and verifies towns: population, regional access, housing, walkability, settlement form, confidence, and the limits of the data.

Every town in the public directory passed the same published screening rules, computed from public datasets. This page is meant to explain each rule, where the data comes from, what the scores do and do not mean, etc.

1. Population screening

The point of Townsteading is to live near other people while not getting swallowed by city slickers. Therefore, a basic rule of 1-5k total popultion has been implemented.

Below 1,000, a “town” is usually just an intersection between two state roads without any essential areas like grocers, banks, community parks, etc.

2. The regional-city relationship

In order to realistically build a townstead, you will need a mid-sized city in a reasonable vicinity for people to find work if needed. They also supply things like hospitals or places of worship (if you don’t align with the main religion of the town). A rule for these cities is 50-200k people with a maximum of an hour drive; some closer of course.

3. The route threshold

For every candidate we compute a modeled driving route to its regional center using OSRM over the OpenStreetMap road network, and we keep only towns reachable in 60 minutes or less. Routes are checked for plausibility (sane speeds, sane detours) before they count.

Drive times on this site are modeled, not live traffic. They were computed once, in batch; road conditions, closures, and rush hour will change them.

4. Housing and affordability

Affordability is essential to Townsteading in order for normal people to even get involved. This is one of the weaker points of this database as the housing market has fluctuated quite a bit since 2024 (median home value is based on data from 2020-2024). Expect the average home in each town to be a bit pricier.

Some places do not report every field in a given ACS release; very small places especially. Missing fields lower a town’s confidence and appear on its profile as “Data unavailable.” They are never filled with zeroes or estimates.

5. Walkability

For each candidate we model a 15-minute walk from the town center over the actual street network and measure three things:

• Destination access (45%) — how many everyday destinations (groceries, pharmacies, schools, libraries, parks, post offices, cafes, civic buildings) fall within the walk.
• Network connectivity (30%) — how connected the reachable street grid is.
• Compactness (25%) — how compactly the town’s built form fits around its center.

Not all of this data is totally accurate, as some towns in the directory had places not reported.

6. Settlement form

“Towns” that are actually just municipalites within a metropolis have been removed.

7. Demographics

Town profiles report ACS demographics factually: age structure, households and families, education, income and poverty, race and ethnicity. Demographics inform confidence and context.

8. The Townsteading score

The score is a 0–100 weighted combination:

On maps, towns are colored by relative fit within the total corpus: deep green for scores of 80 and above, medium green for 65–80, ochre below 65.

10. Limitations

Limits of this dataset:

• Census lag. ACS 5-year estimates describe 2020–2024; population estimates run to 2025. A fast-changing town will be misdescribed.
• OpenStreetMap incompleteness. Small-town coverage varies; walkability inputs can be partial, and profiles say so when they are.
• Housing-market movement. Median values trail the market, sometimes badly.
• Route variation. Modeled routes differ from real driving.
• No neighborhood detail. Scores describe the whole place, not your street.
• No qualitative knowledge. Nothing here knows the town. People who live there do; go talk to them.

Data vintages

Corrections are welcome — see Contact. For the broader idea behind the screen, read What Is Townsteading?.