I'm glad you've found something that works for you (really!) but you're cherry-picking. The key problem is this:

> 5 minutes walk or 1 minute drive to a shop for groceries, hardware, lumber, restaurants, kid parks.

This might be true for you but that's probably because your income is much higher than the median where you live such that you can afford just off Main St is whatever qualifies as central where you live.

By definition not everyone can do that. And I say by definition because:

- Average walking speed is about 5 feet per second

- 5 minutes to just one of the destinations you mention puts you at at radius of 1500 feet

- The average supermarket size is, say, 40,000 square feet [1]

- Let's assume an entry on each side and a square footprint of 200x200. That doesn't include parking

- It seems ~150 parking spaces per acre is a good estimate [2], putting the space for each at roughly 300 square feet

- I can't find any stats or the average number of parking spaces for a supermarket so let's go with 100 for 30,000 square feet bringing out supermarket footprint to 70,000

- Assuming these things are circular (best case) and you can walk in straight lines (best case) the radius of the store is 112 feet. The parking lot eats another 38 feet of that

- So the circle for being within 5 minutes is 112 feet + 1500 feet - 70,000 square feet, which we'll call ~8 million square feet.

- Average lot sizes are harder to figure out. There's data like this [3] but that includes cities. Even in big cities like Atlanta or Kansas City you can see lot sizes over an acre.

- There is also things you need to roads, (more) parking spaces and so on so probably a better way to approach this is houses per acre [4]. Based on medians of 24 acres and 60 housing units, that puts the average house footprint (including ancillary services) at ~18,000 square feet. I actually think that's rather generous too as the figures were for a subdivision. Small towns (with the possible exception of older towns such as what you have in New England) will probably have higher average house footprints.

- That means within our circle we have ~440 houses.

- According to the 2010 census, the average was 2.58 people per household [5]

- So ~1100 people get to walk to the supermarket in 5 minutes.

- So with 10,000 people, only 1 in 9 has this lifestyle.

- That's just one your points of interest (the market). Add in restaurants, parks and the other things you mentioned and it gets a lot worse very quickly.

My point here is that you are in a privileged position and your characterization of "small town life" is unrepresentative. Most people will have to drive everywhere.

Now granted traffic probably won't be as bad as say LA or Chicago. My point is that being able to walk everywhere in a small town (in the USA at least) is highly unusual, not remotely representative and highly privileged (locally speaking).

[1]: http://time.com/money/136330/why-your-grocery-store-may-soon...

[2]: https://ag.tennessee.edu/cpa/Information%20Sheets/CPA%20222....

[3]: http://eyeonhousing.org/2016/07/lots-in-2015-are-smallest-on...

[4]: https://www.nahb.org/en/research/housing-economics/special-s...

[5]: https://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-14.pdf