A Place To Call Home
Contemplating a Galt's Gulch that's not so tedious and that you (and your wife) might actually want to live in
I got some big, big plans
Build a little house out on some hand-me-down land
Find a little island where we go to get tan
I bet we take our kids down there one day
-Chris Lane
Could be a cabin by a bend in the river
Could be something your old man handed down
Could be something you built on your own
Everybody got something he calls home
- Roger Waters
If you were planning for where you wanted to raise your family, what would you have in mind?
Some people set about the idea of building a community by getting several of their friends to all move out together to one town and buy houses on the same block, or buy a plot of land and subdivide it, or something similar. Or live in a big commune together, which is usually either hippies or a religious cult and sometimes both, but can also be SBF and his effective altruist bitcoin buddies… so yeah, I guess that’s basically both with a solid sprinkling of extra amphetamines. Well, I don’t really want to end up extra crispy like the Branch Davidians, and the Bhagwan Shree Rajneeshis also got pretty out there, and in general I’m going to have to steer clear of all of that cult-flavored end of this.
Instead, what I’m talking about here is some thoughts looking to build a particularly livable community - I suppose you could say survivable, though I didn’t overly intend being survivalists as I’m not trying to put that particular lifestyle front and center. I’ll advocate a certain level of preparedness - really, I admire the Latter Day Saints that way - but a lot of the prepper community is basically LARPing at actually being sustainable survivalists, and the way you survive the proverbial SHTF scenario is not primarily by hoarding gold and guns (maybe a little bit) but by building a community that hangs together in that case, and can sustain itself in tough times. (Somewhat ironically, Far Cry 5’s Hope County and their annoyingly catchy theme song can make a better community model than you’d think though clearly the obligatory evil cult in that storyline is… outlandish.) To use the technical term, this community should be capable of at least relative autarky, and in particular this is envisioned as bootstrapping economic independence by a knowledge-worker community transplant, which tends to mean significant remote income as compared to most smaller towns.
So having said all that, this is not the blueprint for Fallout’s Brotherhood of Steel, nor is it Asimov’s Encyclopedia Foundation. Though I have put quite some thought into something a little bit like the latter, and other friends liked the former, so if you find this article truly enthralling, let me know and perhaps we’ll revisit (possibly with some collaborators) with an eye towards the longer view.
I’m afraid the concept presented herein is much more down to earth, or at least, isn’t science-fiction. It may be speculative, but it’s not all that speculative.
And once I get things back in proper order - a little longer term - I may just send out invites; there’s something to be said for doing it rather than just describing it, and it wouldn’t do to give away the secrets of the Encyclopedia Foundation …or the Morrow Project. (IYKYK)
So… let’s start where this started, on the “small scale” of planning for my family: though it may feel like it’s been an age, it hasn’t actually been all that long since the real impetus for this plan rather rudely began prompting us to consider relocating, which was of course: the pandemic. When COVID hit, and it was clear that this wasn’t just going to be “a lockdown for a couple of weeks to flatten the curve” people started getting pretty stir crazy.
And I love my family dearly, but I thought: we could really do with some more space. We’re doing everything remotely anyway. School is running on “distance learning” and shows no signs of getting over that anytime soon (and sure enough, it didn’t) - so we talked about it and I said: what do you think about relocating, at least for the duration of this crisis? Someplace safer… in case it gets worse? (Keep in mind that in the early days of COVID we didn’t particularly know how bad it was or wasn’t going to get; countries were setting up field hospitals and the numbers looked bad for older people: there was some folks prognosticating that this was going to wipe out the Boomers and while that looked overly dire, factual information was pretty hard to come by. The news was full of hysteria and the Internet full of people with remarkably stupid theories. At least the damned roads were clear of traffic.)
My wife stretched like a cat and flipped her hair to the side and snuggled in to talk. “What’d you have in mind?”
Oh, someplace a little further out. With some more space for everyone so we can all spread out and have plenty of room to not get in each other’s way, and some more land so we can rather more seriously social distance from our neighbors, just in case we have to.
So… how about a ranch, with a few outbuildings: say, your typical barn and/or a stable, but also a nice separate swimming pool/gym building with a small sauna and hot tub, a greenhouse - maybe also a solarium for us, which might double for amateur astronomy since we’d be far enough from city lights that we could actually see the stars, maybe a detached building for office space so work can stay neatly separated from home, a good sized garage for the various vehicles and room for a couple to spare, and a playground space for the kids. Probably some indoor and outdoor play space, really; with room to have other kids over - maybe on an extended basis, or maybe just to do the “social-distancing-movies-in-the-back-yard” routine we’d been doing by projecting movies onto a large white screen once the sun went down and serving popcorn and soft drinks and letting the kids have a social distanced movie night with lawn chairs sprawled around the yard as the only “permitted” social gathering under the rather ridiculous lockdown rules back when nobody really knew how dangerous COVID was going to be. But the kids adored the chance to actually have see friends in person, even if it was just to watch Despicable Me in the back yard and guzzle root beer - lockdown was a positively ridiculous time socially, especially if you were a child, so the occasional moments of interact-with-friends sanity were well valued by our kids and those of everyone we invited.
Anyway, not to digress, the list went on. We weren’t going to put in a full theater (though probably some people would opt for that, and if we found a place equipped for such I’d not refuse, but an entertainment room should suffice.) Perhaps an archery range - we’d all taken that up as a hobby and for exercise outside-the-gym - and my lovely bride prompted me that the kids would also probably want a rock-climbing wall; we scribbled it onto the list. In addition to the usual garage, another garage for the farm/ranch/lawn care equipment, and probably out back a place to park a couple shipping containers for more general purpose and portable storage. Put in a huge propane tank (almost every place we looked at had this!), and solar, and windpower, and enough power storage - Tesla Powerwalls or the like - that we can mostly rely on the renewables. Put in a small data center or at least a couple server racks and a computer lab, or just put that in another shipping container, there certainly are containerized versions of that sort of gear. Maybe in one of the adjacent buildings put a wood shop and a machine shop (it turned out many places we looked at were already equipped for this), set up a gunsmithing facility (surprisingly, this was also something that we found more than a couple of places - I think from people who had been otherwise prepper-minded), and otherwise be prepared to build and repair things - it turned out that basically all of these places were equipped with three-phase power to run a proper set of power tools and at least one had a full six-axis machine shop for CAD/CAM construction, you could have run a modestly sized automated machine shop out of the place albeit it wasn’t entirely cutting edge, but you could have manufactured automotive or marine parts if perhaps not aerospace parts.
“Is the library a separate building, or is that just part of the house?” she asked. I laughed and said we should centralize a kids library in their wing and our stuff in our section, and then add bookcases as necessary until things were manageable. “Board games need their own room, and crafting stuff needs its own room." We briefly discussed the merits of rolling bookshelves, how much pantry space we’d need, whether a walk-in freezer would be a useful thing to have, similarly for a wine cellar, and how often we’d actually use a teppenyaki grill.
We agreed that we’d definitely have to make sure there’s satellite broadband and fiber optic internet service, as well as whatever more generic entertainment options people want like cable or DirectTV or whatever - perhaps it’s gratuitous to have fiber internet and cable internet and satellite, but the potential cost of being cut off far outweighs it and tethering-by-phone really doesn’t cut it for more a device or two. Heck, maybe a place to bury a bunker and some significant long term refrigerated or deep-freeze storage if we really think this pandemic is going to get out of line, and while we’re doing that, faraday-shield the bunker and put a data center backup down there against solar flares or EMP. My wife pointed out that we’d better put a small medical facility there if we’re going to go that far - we didn’t find any place equipped for that, but we did find some firms that did bunker construction that could also include a buildout for emergency medical and dental services - scarcely more than you’d get from a mobile trailer, but that’s a lot more than we’d otherwise have on hand in case of a really big emergency!
Would love to have a helipad or even a full airstrip, and a small fuel depot as part of the garage/hangar. (Turns out you need “blue” (leaded) avgas fuel for prop aircraft, avgas for helicopters, unleaded or possibly premium for your car, and possibly it makes sense to have a flex-fuel vehicle if you want to be particularly adaptable. None of this Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome run-your-economy-on-methane-from-pig-manure, though.) Should probably faraday-cage the garage and a moderate warehouse of spare parts/electronics too, if we’re regarding that threat seriously. Make sure you’ve got well water, purification, septic drainfields - you know, the ability to reasonably go off-grid if you have to. (This, it turned out, was pretty standard.) Certainly guest space - or maybe guest house outbuildings, the proverbial mother-in-law detached house - in case our parents (or perhaps other older relatives) also need a place to go in case the pandemic gets worse. (Common enough to have one already, also easy if not quick to add another - and also, easy to add manufactured homes or park an RV or two.) We started wondering if we’d need a caretaker/housekeeper/groundskeeper house as well - this was going to be a lot of work to maintain.
That was a lot to aim for. There weren’t many places that matched it - basically almost none that hit all the things we had to have, but a handful that were close and could be retrofitted with the things that were missing. More importantly, it was very hard to tour houses once lockdown started - it was especially hard to get anywhere that wasn’t in nearby driving distance. We did seriously consider a couple of them. We fell in love with one that we probably would have gone with that was in New Zealand, which was all the more reason to go because New Zealand was one of the only places dealing sanely with The Virus. But they were basically also not letting anyone in, even if we were willing to buy outrageously gorgeous estates and relocate halfway around the world to do so. (Actually, there were a few in New Zealand we liked, but one that the whole family adored was… well, even with the exchange rate, it was a lot. But it had nearly everything - even a sizable airstrip, and it had a lot of land to build the rest, and it was very scenic. However, life did not cooperate.)
We had to sort out some bare minimums of what we needed nearby any of these remote outposts - reliable power (or exceedingly reliable ability to generate on-site), broadband (or high degree of comfort we’d always have satellite broadband even in inclement weather), utilities (though wells and useful septic could generally suffice) - but even still, we weren’t planning to start growing our own food except in extremely dire situation, so while we wanted a greenhouse, that was for luxury foods like pomegranates in wintertime. We wanted at least a nearby grocery store (that would deliver, during COVID), hardware store (preferably relatively sizable, but it didn’t need to be a full-sized Lowes or Home Depot), gas station, and at least a small town (with a hospital and hopefully a few restaurants that we could maybe order takeout from) not far away and a larger city we could readily reach (via car or whatever flight options we could have - helicopter or Cessna or seaplane or whatever) easily accessible. (The older kids immediately got excited about pilot lessons.) And beyond that, we figured we’d get a lot of things shipped in; Amazon wouldn’t be quite as quick if we were out in the boonies but the selection was the same even if delivery times were longer.
There were some things that I wanted specifically because of the pandemic - not particularly knowing how bad it would be, and with the general understanding that nobody else did either at the start of it all - one retrofit that seemed remarkably straightforward to many buildings was an HVAC modification that some medical facilities had but most places did not: UV sanitization in the air ducting, which would kill viruses and bacteria in the air circulation. I wanted to not only put this in my own house (and outbuildings) but set up a small local business (and/or franchise it) under the theory that if the pandemic dragged on, as it appeared it was going to - certainly it wasn’t going to the a lockdown of “two weeks to flatten the curve” as was initially being bloviated in the news - that if we ever made it back into office buildings, we were going to have to do something to keep people safe. Turns out, of course, that this might be widely helpful for disease reduction in shared spaces (office environments, dorms, apartments, etc) in general - but that the threat of COVID kind of came and went. (Would I still put this in my house’s furnace / air filtration / air conditioning system? Sure.)
One of the things we did manage to miss in retrospect: a soundproof music practice space. (Kids learning to play the trombone is not always a delight to the ears for the other nearby inhabitants of the house.) And my more science-inclined household actually wanted a properly equipped lab, but nobody’s house came equipped with that and everyone gave us strange looks because they’d all seen Breaking Bad (and I hadn’t, but I was familiar with the premise, so the running joke became that I was just going to buy an RV instead) - anyway, they make containerized labs too, so one can always just drop that on the property and hook up power, water, ventilation, and sewer.
But once we sorted out what we were doing during lockdown - which mostly amounted to staying in place, for other reasons that don’t particularly concern this article - there was in fact some effort to relocate some of the people who were having a really intolerable time of it because they were in urban environments that were fine as luxury apartments you came back to in the evening but not the sort of thing you wanted to be cooped up in for the duration of COVID lockdown. So some of the folks who were going stir-crazy in California were relocated for telework purposes, and that… actually didn’t go so well.
You see, having the software guys telework from Idaho was really disruptive and also really pissed off the locals in a lot of cases. One of the biggest culture clash issues in Societal Lessons From COVID is the California Mindset problem where people show up thinking they still live in San Francisco and they have enormous culture shock, and there's a lot of the same sort of classist behavior that they would have protested about back in San Fran … except now they're the “oppressive condescending colonizers”… naturally, they hated it when I called them out on that - but y'know, since I was the guy writing the paychecks, I generally got to say “you need to get a grip on reality.”
I can't count the number of times though that the Left Coast engineers who were used to the liberal big city mindset gave me some response that amounted to “holy shit, I’m in a flyover state, and everyone here has pickup trucks, and oh my god this is Trump country, I can’t get a good oat milk latte anywhere, and I just have the urge to lecture them all on how they should live” and I had to say “Will you listen to yourself? You sound like a condescending caricature. You are going to get punched in the face if you act like that. Chill out and have a beer with your neighbor, establish a rapport and talk about something other than things that offend you and maybe be open minded, just like you always preach.” (Also, don’t start off by taking your neighbor a bunch of your boutique craft IPAs if he’s a Budweiser guy - bring over a case of Guinness and tell him you’re half-Irish and want to welcome a neighbor properly - but respect people’s sensibilities about what they enjoy even if it’s not your thing. You can always, heaven forbid, ask - if you host a barbeque and you have to stock some Budweiser for them and some Goose Island IPA for you, and they don’t touch your beer… hey, more for you.)
One of the difficulties in modern society is that it has become easy for us to be culturally stovepiped - it's easy to get all your news and social interactions from whatever echo chamber you prefer, and think "the other guys are delusional, My News Is The Truth / My Friends All Agree" - whether that’s MSNBC and Facebook or Fox and Truth Social, there will need to be some societal reintegration efforts to de-social-network the world I think, because we have effectively segregated ourselves again. And all the major news networks are predominantly propaganda engines that don’t do journalism anymore.
But as ever, I digress.
As you might surmise, the process of planning some of this and thinking about what we’d want led to some bigger concepts, as it tends to do. Now, when we were planning this, some of the issues with culture clash hadn’t quite bitten us yet, though I should have seen them coming - I just gave the otherwise-intelligent-but-sort-of-socially-inept Silicon Valley computer geniuses more credit than I should for being able to fit in to a very different culture. I’m sure they’re capable of it, and to be fair a lot of very initially left-wing people who were close to the Antifa or BLM riots rather abruptly went kind of centrist-right with just a sprinkling of Obama sensibilities for conversational purposes. (The buccaneers over in the Tortuga Society seem to think the difference is intractable - but to be fair, they’re mostly similarly autistic from the political right instead, and I think many of them started out further left and found a right-wing awakening online.) I think most of this is adaptable, although some of it is just a matter of expectation-setting or just recruiting the right people to come in the first place. And there were specific things that had been planned that do not make it into this Substack - perhaps I’ll expand on those later, perhaps not, though those do start to look a little more like the Encyclopedia Foundation or a comparable preparation for autarky.
But as I said - we spent a bunch of time on this, and here’s what we came up with as the core of what we’d want to do as far as a building a community for remote workers…presumably technology workers; culturally speaking, the finance crowd doesn’t seem as well disposed to this sort of pitch, and most other groups aren’t well suited to a fully remote jobset. For the purpose of this discussion, I’m referring to our proverbial small town as Littleton - it’s rather deliberately a placeholder name, rather than a particular spot, though I have a few that looked promising earlier, when I was first planning this.
As the centerpiece of a community of tech workers (or, generically, remote workers) we focus on building a solid K-12 private school and encourage people to relocate specifically to have a reliable, safe, non-woke education for their kids that they could rely on to be safe, decent, cover the basics and support excellence/gifted/highly capable kids, have a variety of sports and enrichment programs and practical trades training in addition to college prep and good college recruiting pipelines. This is the primary incentive for people to relocate as a young family or when planning to start one - a desire to have a better environment for their kids, as well as a safe/comfortable place to live for themselves. In some respects, it’s easier to relocate once you are coupled up - there’s less need to be prowling around a city trying to find The Right Mate - and more incentive to do so, because then people’s “nesting instinct” tends to make them want to make their own little Place To Call Home which is comfortable and safe with neighbors they trust in a culture they enjoy. As long as you have a career path that you are comfortable with that is amenable to telework / branch office / some sort of remote arrangement, preferably one that generates enough income that allows your wife to be a stay-at-home-mother during the children’s formative years, that’s ideal. (Or, often she’ll have some ambitions of being a part time writer, or an Etsy Mom, or part time registered nurse, or freelance cosmetologist, or various other piecework professions - or pursuing her own further education, should you want to be the occasional illustrious dual-PhD Dr. and Dr. couple. If so: it’s rough doing your doctorate and raising kids, quietly plan to get that lady a nanny/au pair/housekeeper to make her life easier.)
When designing a high-end private K-12 school - let's for the purpose of this discussion call it Littleton Academy, much as we've called the town Littleton as a placeholder name, and yes there are some real world Littleton Academies but to be clear this is a new conjectural one - I’d focus on a few key elements that balance academic excellence, personal growth, and real-world readiness. This might follow more of a Montessori philosophy for the early grades - emphasizing self-directed learning, mixed age classrooms (for example commonly intermingling for grades 1-3 and 4-6), hands-on learning, and uninterrupted work periods.
Certain characteristics have proven to be particularly effective for student success. First among those is top-tier faculty: Hire passionate, highly qualified teachers with expertise in their fields—think PhDs or industry pros for upper grades, and creative, nurturing educators for younger kids. Small class sizes (10-15 students max) to ensure personalized attention, or for larger classes, multiple instructors per classroom for the grades 1-3 and 4-6 larger classes.
Similarly, since "one size fits all" education is largely a recipe for babysitting rather than actual education, an effective learning environment is largely based on a customized curriculum: blend rigorous academics (STEM, humanities, music and arts, history and classics) with flexibility for students to explore their interests. Offer advanced options like advanced placement, international baccalaureate, or college-level courses early on, alongside practical skills—coding, financial literacy, entrepreneurship—from elementary up.
As far as Littleton Academy itself, you'd want to build with state of the art facilities. Think cutting-edge science labs, a maker space with both conventional wood/metal shop space as well as 3D printers and robotics (this can very probably be done in partnership with one or another of the local businesses willing to sponsor it), a music wing, a performing arts center, and top-notch sports facilities (olympic-grade pool, proper gymnasium and competitive spaces for any school sports, turf fields, etc). Add a library with both physical books suited for K-12 (and probably, in practice - up into the community college levels at least, I expect we'll have some rather gifted kids amongst this lot) and digital resources, and possibly VR setups for immersive learning although I've never personally found them effective. It may be worth putting a small broadcast station in the school (radio or even television) - or at least the facility to do so on a local basis; cinematography and broadcast are not an inexpensive field of study but are a draw for many students, and are fascinating to learn. They also serve as a basis for extremely high end videoconferencing, which brings us to our next point: despite being in a small town, we are no longer culturally isolated like we would have been in previous generations; it's much more feasible to bring in guest speakers for the students - scientists, CEOs, artists—from around the world, in person or virtually. Depending on how ambitious this is intended to be, perhaps there could be an international exchange program (I think this is perhaps better held for a college level) but language skills should probably be taught relatively early - a second or even third language learned early while neuroplasticity makes that more straightforward is advantageous to kids. (Teachers - and tutors - will be needed; kids seem to have a particularly wide range of developmental rate on second-language skills and musical talent, so general education and tutoring in those fields is staff-intensive.)
And then there's some level of curriculum and educational process holistic overhaul that is quietly rather necessary but that doesn't draw as much attention compared to the sorts of higher profile issues like individual test scores or new facility construction. The educational process and school life is a full day for the kids - especially since, in many cases, it doesn't end when the school bell rings but does continue to after-school clubs, study groups, work projects, Scouts, sports, and the like. This is - for better or worse - your child's community, possibly as much as their home life is, so you want it to be welcoming and engaging - generally at least relatively friendly, but always at least somewhat challenging, because if you get used to coasting through life on easy mode, you're in for a very unpleasant surprise when you get into the real world. So you want Littleton Academy to include outdoor activities (sports, hiking, scouting, gardening) to build resilience. Emphasize leadership, teamwork, and ethics through projects and clubs. Integrate mental health support with counselors on-site, mindfulness programs, and an emphasis on student and family community.
Tech integration is another important question, and it seems foolish not to plan for it. Every student gets a device (tablet or laptop) with AI-driven learning tools tailored to their pace and access to both some filtered internet but also a relatively comprehensive school library of digital books and reference materials. Use tech for real-world simulations—think virtual stock trading or designing sustainable cities, as well as school collaborations - but encourage kids towards physical meetups where possible, because the physical proximity of being in Littleton makes that viable in a way that it isn't in a larger environment. Breakout rooms at school or library or community center should be viable, and building/reinforcing spacial skills and coordination that a screens-only lifestyle doesn’t handle seems to be increasingly a thing noted in child developmental research. Parents should get regular updates via email and/or app, but also regular teacher outreach and workshops for parents on supporting learning, and a community feel with events like family science fairs or art showcases. It would be best to have PTA involvement to keep parents looped in actively to what their kids are doing; it is easy for parents (especially dual-employed parents) to get distracted with work - this is less true for the stay-at-home-moms but that all depends where everyone's lifestyle balance falls. But also - keep smartphones out of schools, or at least highly limited; they seem to be an enormous distraction to everyone’s attention spans.
I don't think this needs to go overboard, but I would encourage a campus designed at least respectfully of nature, and with some showcase of what is feasible - partially because city kids could stand a little more education as to what rural living is like, and we can’t count on that entirely being done by the Scouts. We're unlikely to get full autarky, but showing some ability to generate limited self-sufficiency by eco-friendly campus—solar panels and windpower, rainwater harvesting and a greenhouse — and a curriculum that weaves in awareness of the agricultural landscape around them and problem-solving that isn't just Big City Solutions For The Environment but actually focuses on building a better world is a legitimate goal. Regardless of how much you do or don't believe in anthropogenic climate change, I think we can all reasonably agree: nobody wants to live in a polluted environment, and taking reasonable efforts to not poison the places where we live or where we grow our food is a lot better than all the kids and grandkids coming down with heavy metal poisoning, dioxin cancer, or any number of other unpleasant pollution birth defects.
The vibe for Littleton Academy would be elite but grounded — preparing kids not just for Ivy League admissions but for life - not everyone will go the Ivy League route, in fact I would be hard pressed to recommend it as a good value today for most of the Ivy League, and I'll Substack more about that later (and the exceptions to that rule!) There should be encouragement for students whose aptitudes take them towards the trades and direct applied skills, as well as those who want higher education.
As far as incorporating students not just from the newly arrived knowledge workers but also from the local families go, some quick thoughts: Littleton Academy would follow a traditional private school model, but beyond the first few grades, students would be identified into one of several “tracks” depending on aptitudes. This way all children in town have access to an elite education, but the “general” track would be for kids that would otherwise attend public schools. Then other “tracks” such as medical magnet, engineering magnet etc or an “honors” track would serve as the private school within the private school. Gifted children of support staff can be moved to other tracks as needed. Paying students will likely have more leeway - and also, let’s be fair, more tutoring support (and likely more innate aptitude given relatively elite parents).
Now assuming we have a local hospital - as I mention below - it’s likely we have a medical track, it’d resemble something like pre-med at a community college if you did nothing but Littleton Academy and should ideally qualify you into a nursing program without further difficulty, or on into pre-med, biotech or biology at a university level - obviously there will be some cross-pollination here. An engineering track is likely to directly feed those determined to directly apply mechanical skills, and might lead more towards civil engineering, mechanical engineering, or various trade skills; this might overlap with or might split off into a “advanced manufacturing” or “industrial technology” track - the more usual machine-shop and aerospace trade pipeline. Certainly there’s likely to be a “general” track that mirrors a traditional public school curriculum, as well as “communications and performing arts” centered on media - either broadcast media or performance media, as well as a “university” track.
In particular for the university track - since I think most knowledge workers will expect that of their children - college preparation would be a cornerstone, woven into the fabric of the experience from day one. And as you’ll expect, this is the one people ask me about the most. Here’s how Littleton Academy would approach it over the years:
For the early foundation years of K-8, we’d focus on academic rigor: Start with a strong base in critical thinking, writing, and math. Introduce Socratic seminars by middle school to sharpen reasoning, and teach research skills—how to source, cite, and analyze—starting in grade 6, or even earlier depending on how well suited this is to the Montessori-style classrooms. Also, provide exploration opportunities: Expose students to a swath of subjects (e.g., philosophy, engineering basics) via electives and hands-on projects. Help them discover passions early, which colleges love to see. But also, give them an early grounding in standardized test prep, starting low-stakes PSAT-style practice in grade 7-8. Focus on test-taking strategies (time management, eliminating wrong answers) to build confidence without burnout.
Once you get to a high school focus (9-12), emphasize advanced coursework: advanced placement courses, international baccalaureate, and other college level courses especially if we can swing something like dual-enrollment at a nearby state university or even community college. Push students to take at least 5-7 rigorous courses by senior year, tailored to their strengths—e.g., Advanced Placement Calculus for math whizzes, International Baccalaureate History for humanities buffs.
Hire a "dream team" of ex-admissions officers from top schools (think Harvard or Stanford) as full-time college counselors. Start one-on-one advising in grade 9 to map out course loads, extracurriculars, and summer plans. Guide students to lead, not just join, clubs or teams. Encourage niche pursuits—founding a robotics team, publishing a research paper, or competing nationally in debate—to stand out. Connect them with mentors or internships via alumni networks. Students should each have something they can excel at - identifying that and helping them shine is a key differentiator. Similarly, embed SAT/ACT prep into the curriculum—weekly practice sections in English and math classes—plus optional bootcamps with top tutors. Aim for 90th-percentile scores (1400+ SAT, 32+ ACT) as a baseline for competitive applicants. Run essay coaching workshops starting junior year on crafting compelling personal statements. Pair students with writing coaches to refine their voice and stories—colleges want authenticity, not just polish. It's far too likely that a lot of applicants are going to sound like ChatGPT for some strange reason, so being distinct and authentic is going to have to be necessary to compete.
In order to differentiate beyond academia - and this can get trickier, since this can quickly become budget-busting for some - but where feasible, students can benefit additional summer activities that position them well. These can be the Research Science Institute at MIT for STEM students, or the Telluride Association Summer Program for humanities students, internships with a promising firm (ideally in their field of interest - either an established firm or a startup), or even volunteering for a cause they believe in. Certainly, for kids interested in arts or technology, portfolio building is important: providing tools (e.g., Adobe Suite, coding platforms, tech toolkits eg Arduino/Raspberry Pi) and showcasing opportunities—gallery exhibitions, hackathons—to create a digital portfolio colleges can see.
As the senior year arrives, the college counselors (or even alumni) should conduct mock interviews playing admissions officers - practice everything from “Tell me about yourself” or “What inspires you?” to quirky curveballs like “What’s your favorite poem and why?” Students should not be nervous going into these, nor caught off guard, and it should in turn give the counselor a better idea what the student may be well suited to.
The counselor should work with the student and parent on what amounts to college matchmaking: basically, a data-driven approach to monitor grades, test scores, and activities, flagging gaps early (e.g., “You need to be able to show more leadership experience”). Share these with parents every semester or so, in case parents want to plan for summer activities or extracurricular activities/internships/etc to plug gaps or social-network toward certain schools. The objective here is to give a reasonable idea of where the student is likely to be able to gain admission. Analyze student profiles against admit data from the last decade—GPA, scores, extracurriculars—to target realistic and reach schools. Aim for a mix: 3 safeties, 3 targets, 3 stretches; the days when the top kids get into every school they apply to are basically over. There’s simply too much demand for the top schools, even legacy candidates don’t always make it - although somehow, it seems to still help if your parents are willing to donate very generously.
In the fall of senior year, dedicate a week to finalizing apps—essays, Common App forms, supplements—with staff on hand. Teach negotiation for financial aid packages, too, though this is of questionable use. And then, probably some level of post-acceptance support Guide on picking the right fit—visits, alumni chats—and prep for the transition with a “College 101” seminar (dorm life, time management).
And of course - for those of you at the “trying to settle down” stage - all of this consideration about raising kids and preparing for the future is sort of the basis of a screening question. Something along the lines of "When we start a family, what do you think about moving to Littleton... so that the kids can have the best educational experience possible, and you can know they're being looked after by great teachers for the full kindergarten through senior year education? It'll be a safe community around like minded people… healthy organic food locally grown just miles from your house, the kids will grow up learning to ride horses…" and whatever other selling points you want. It's mostly a way on selling her on that lifestyle - SAHM / somewhat pampered life - while making it sound like it's all for the benefit of the kids and her, powered by your high income remote job (or job stacking or whatever). But mostly, it’s a way to have a fun and serious daydream conversation about your future together to see how compatible you are when you’re not just making out - one hopes you’ve at least got the chemistry part down, or the rest of the planning isn’t likely to bear fruit!
By this point, you’re probably wondering: all right, the kids will be well seen after - what else is there in town other than the school? It’s quite the culture shock to pick up and move from a cosmopolitan environment to a small town, and especially if you’re not immersed in your work, you may feel the whiplash of that culture-shift a little more strongly than most. So especially for the young brides newly arriving at Littleton - what do they have to look forward to? What is literally in the town?
Hopefully you'll pardon me for being a bit lengthy - this Substack article isn’t my briefest - but my interlocutors seemed interested in many details as regards the small town idea and how it might actually be more livable for the predominantly-city-origin knowledge workers and their families, so I wanted to outline this minus some of the eccentricities that I had in particular for the group I initially intended to put in it. Still, most of it translates well enough - since either way, it was targeted at a pretty high end knowledge worker demographic, and I came at this project with a fair bit of knowledge about what did and didn’t work. (There was another group trying to do this to basically make a ski lodge community remote work in Utah - it was for various reasons the wrong choice, but I won't go into that - if you want to read about what made the Powder Mountain community go a little off the rails, the Guardian did a bit of a writeup on it as did the NY Times - at a quick summary, it was a little too much of the Davos / Aspen / Vail crowd and a little less practical place to live than is being discussed here.)
If you're envisioning a relatively high income small town - like a ski town / resort town, (and that might, for a panoply of reasons, not actually be the best model) but with the idea of putting it in the Midwest or Rockies or Heartland in general - you want some level of relatively comprehensive grocery with both staples plus boutique luxury/BOBO (bourgeois bohemian) goods - perhaps not literally Whole Foods but that sort of vibe - a somewhat upscale Hy-Vee would probably do, you want a bank and/or credit union, there must of course be an incidental post office, probably again a relatively comprehensive hardware store and other related hard goods (eg tools, and plumbing/building supplies), almost certainly a spa and beauty salon with some sort of integral (or adjoining) massage place, a local community entertainment center - generally, one can think of this as a theater (which will do live music some nights and stage shows some nights, but can be a cultural center), possibly a small cinema, and if the weather suits there can also be a drive-in theater somewhere a couple miles out of town (it'll add to the small-town feel but modernized drive-ins are actually pretty neat).
You'll want a selection of restaurants with a decent catering arm, both for the dining out experience and for mothers who don't want to cook that night (and you might add food trucks if you want to augment for seasonality or festivals). Arguably this sort of town could support some “virtual restaurant” / “ghost kitchen” businesses also; it largely depends on the size of the town and the takeout business demographics - this is basically the food truck business without the truck. Probably a conventional franchise restaurant too if the town has any size, eg a McDonalds, as much as I personally despise them. Couple gas stations - the traditional answer is one at each end of town, and generally one is more gasoline plus car-wash-and-mini-mart, the other tends to be gasoline plus service center / tire-and-oil-change. Several coffee shops of various styles and clienteles, maybe a couple of them suited to late night audiences. It always seems like a bakery is popular, especially if they deliberately cater to both the lowbrow and highbrow crowd. A couple of bars or taverns (or eight of them if this is Wisconsin, haha), and likely also a wine/tapas bar, maybe a cocktail bar also if the town is sizable enough (likely this is just part of one of the restaurants). Very possibly the wine bar and one of the coffee houses doubles as a secondary social/cultural center for poetry slams or that sort of thing, and usually at least one bar or tavern will host live music or have a place for a band to perform regularly. If there’s enough call for it, you’ll have themes to the bars as well - stereotypically: a sports bar or two, an Irish bar, a country bar or two, a “dive bar” that tends more working class or “rougher crowd” - perhaps even the proverbial biker bar, though that seems to mostly be a thing of the past - and sometimes a more genteel watering hole, though that generally turns out to be attached to someone’s country club or just ends up being the wine bar or some such. There might even be a dance club. And sometimes particular professions adopt a place - it’s not uncommon to have a place near the airport where pilots and mechanics raise a glass at the end of their shift.
But for now, back to outlining the other establishments. Littleton is almost certain to have a bookstore - maybe something that sells new and used books if there’s any local resale market, and potentially also some school supplies. Preferably also a library, especially with a decent sized kids section. Likely the bookstore and the library are serving different audiences. I'm not clear how many different sorts of clothing/fashion stores will be required, but at least general men’s, women’s, kids, shoe stores, and likely more variety depending on the size and economy - but you're not likely to economically support a Louis Vuitton in a town this size. Maybe a department store if the town is big enough, it's not likely to warrant a Macys or similar, likewise even a general purpose store like a Target is probably overkill. Likely a there’s at least one mini-mart / 7-11, in addition to whatever sort of convenience-store function is attached to the gas stations. (But someplace people buy their hunting licenses / bait-and-tackle shop in addition to buying slurpees and donuts or late night Doritos or Advil or Trojans or gasoline or whatever; it’s entirely likely there’s in fact gas pumps at the 7-11 and the large grocery store - and at the airport - in addition to the dedicated gas stations.)
Now, parents will want some level of daycare facilities - this probably won’t literally all be at the school - and the kids will particularly enjoy it if there's some adjacent kiddo entertainment area/theme to it (eg, trampoline park/bounce house/community sports center/recreation area). There’s endless expansion ideas for the kiddo entertainment center depending on what you want them to be able to do or encourage them to do - you can put in mini golf and laser tag, have an escape room or three and rotate them a couple times a year so they don’t get old, you could just put in sturdy benches and table space and give people community places to play card games and tabletop games (eg Pokemon, Magic, Warhammer, D&D, board games, whatever’s currently popular). In any case you probably want to ensure the whole area has good wifi, comfortable seating, an on-site nurse, a cafeteria with some inexpensive healthy food (catered for kids in daycare, available for kids in the entertainment area), and adult supervision/chaperoning. Now possibly you team this up with kiddo study hall / tutoring if you're going more the prep school route, but I suspect it’s more likely that you make it a “junior rec center” and attach some areas specifically for scholastic work (and probably also for music practice and band jam sessions) - but basically give the town a central point for moms/nannies/caregivers to drop off/pick up kids and hand them off to tutors or coaches or church youth group. Speaking of which, you’d want some area that is from time to time usable as fairgrounds relatively vaguely near the town, possibly terminating into the town square - and it’d be nice if this is basically doubles as impromptu park space or overflow area for the junior rec center.
Again, if this is a swanky resort town you probably have an art gallery (if it's not as big, this probably is also your wine bar or some other modestly snooty gathering place). You'll undoubtedly want a pharmacy - this might be a Walgreens/CVS or a compounding pharmacy or maybe it's part of a clinic/hospital (and again, a major grocery store will likely include some level of this also). For that matter, you’ll need someplace that sells eyeglasses (and presumably also has an optometrist, perhaps this is part of the hospital or perhaps it’s a private practice as part of a local eyeware vendor.) There may also be niche shops for the local environment - a hunting and fishing store is likely or at least it’ll be a sizable chunk of a local sporting goods store… and probably more of a gun store than many city dwellers would first expect. Likewise there’s likely to be a dealer in vehicles from cars to motorcyles to boats to RVs to airplanes if all those are present locally. Some sort of mixed hard goods store is probable - appliances, furniture, office furnishings/office supplies, and probably some electronics. I’m sure someone will have a small computer store - possibly doubling as the sort of place you can do some document printing or 3D printing, and maybe doing some light repairs and servicing as well such as cracked phone screens and the like. Some small shop is going to be the local vendor for cell phones and other elecronics - whether it’s worth having a full set of stores for all the major carriers or not, I doubt, or whether they just all live under one franchise roof; most likely one or two stores will offer a modest selection of devices in stock from their preferred carrier(s) and will be able to get you anything else special-ordered with very short turnaround.
You're likely to want an exercise facility - many people will want personal gyms, but a community gymnasium (and pool, and basketball court, etc) may be well received. Could be the YMCA, could be higher end. There may be other locally popular sports that also warrant this - a ball field is usually easy to just dedicate a plot of land and maintain it; a bowling alley or an ice-skating/hockey rink is more of an investment, and it largely depends on what community you get. Assume that you might need something of the sort as the town grows, though.
Littleton should have a relatively accessible airport, even of the three-flights-a-day variety that mostly exists to do flights to the local hub city or to do medevac flights - or to let private planes take off and land. Wouldn't hurt to have an actual river port and docks and rail line also, though you don't want that at the center of town either. A good health care system: dental care, clinic, ideally a small hospital, medevac services to larger hospital if needed. Or maybe you do end up as the site of the county hospital and that's part of the draw (if so, situate it on the edge of town so that the ambulances don't disturb everyone). Speaking of which, you should definitely have a fire station, and some level of police presence, even if modest. You should actively encourage having the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts in town. (And search-and-rescue should be a common elective or scout merit badge.) You want the private school we were talking about earlier and if the town is big enough you may also need a public school - though as we’ll discuss in a minute, it may make sense for Littleton Academy to widely offer scholarships to the locals in order to avoid socioeconomic class dissonance. Veterinary services. Mechanic/automotive services. Feed / fertilizer / farm supply. Private stables and equestrian instruction for kids who want to learn but don't have farmland/ranchland of their own (or who want to compete). Depending on what part of the country you attract people from, maybe a sprint car track or other raceway. I suspect you'll end up with at least a few churches, but hard to forecast what that will end up being denomination wise unless you recruit specifically for that - in the Midwest though I’d guess on Catholic and Lutheran at least. Ideal to have a local radio station and/or TV station too, or at least the ability to fire one up in case of emergency - though that may end up being part of Littleton Academy, the city may also prefer that it to live at City Hall or near emergency services. And on the more simple end of things, the town should have a few prominent parks set up for family activities: playgrounds, picnics, recreation, casual sports, etc.
It'd be nice to have water and sewer, but wells and septic are workable in much of the country - though in that case, you definitely need a septic company relatively locally. It'd also be good to be locally power-independent - whether that's a local dam or some array of renewables with battery backup / pumped storage or whatever, small modular reactor installations are likely prohibitive. You do need trash service and likely whatever level of recycling and/or composting that people are comfortable with though. And high speed broadband - and a good cellular backbone - are both pretty much essential these days; I'd make a point of putting a direct satellite uplink at the airport as well and running local fiber from there.
You want also a support staff in and around town - to man the restaurants, manicure the lawns and manicure/pedicure the spa treatments, to serve as nannies or maids, nurses and doctors, teachers and coaches and less formal instructors, and subject matter experts for the various establishments - especially as tutors, educators, librarians, and the like. Some of this will be extended families, which is ideal, but some of this will be hired help, and we'll want to screen these people carefully (that will also be a selling point).
And of course if Tom Swift is running his operation locally, we’ll want a nice machine shop, makerspace and a Hot Circuits - and he’ll probably want his own launch point at safe distance from the airport (but hooked into air traffic control) for whatever he’s putting into the air …or low earth orbit.
As far as choosing things that are particularly appealing to people - it’s kind of funny to see what people sort of consistently find attractive even across demographic and social class boundaries. For a lot of us, that’s a bookstore, but not everyone, and I hear plenty of you say “meh, I have the Amazon app on my phone, I can just order whatever I need and they’ll drop it on my doorstep” so fair enough. A particularly well stocked hardware store is almost a toy store to blue-collar men, but you’ll find it surprisingly appealing even well into the high end male demographic, you could readily build a societal Third Place for social gathering there if the culture was suitable (likewise, if it becomes seen as trashy, it is often offputting) - this is, as ever, a status signalling game, and if this is a place for gentleman scientists or hobbyist pilots or teens to build drones and Arduinos and not just roughneck laborers, you can build a place for shared culture; it will require some deliberate effort. The comparable place for women seems to be the craft store: something like Joanne (which as I write this is going out of business) / Michaels / Hobby Lobby, which attracts women and their kids across a surprisingly wide economic range and sells a rather stunning array of different goods that are in turn used for various crafting and decorating needs. (A friend of mine from high school works at a store adjacent to this specializing in high end vacuum cleaners and sewing machines - something I thought impossibly niche - but she absolutely makes a killing selling what are effectively robotized sewing machines that immediately struck me as an Etsy-shop-in-a-box.)
One of the things this town does almost certainly need is a UPS store - a means for convenient packing and shipping of small-package goods - to support microindustry, by which I mean both Etsy Moms and micromanufacturing along the lines of one-off electronics orders from Tom Swift’s Hot Circuits franchises; similarly that sort of place usually has rental mailbox service for incoming mail and package delivery (as well as notary services, photocopying, faxing, passport photos, and the like, for the rare occasions when you need those kind of services). Plus of course the obvious services of UPS (and generally also FedEx and/or DHL shipping).
Elderly care is one that you're eventually going to need. Is this live-in nursing care for Grandma, who is living at the estate of the knowledge worker? Or if she needs full time care, but not yet hospitalization, shall we plan for a nice nursing home down by the lake? Someplace accessible, where the kids and grandkids can come visit, and where they'll have on-site 24-7 nursing support and good community involvement from local churches, Scouts, and regular shuttles to get people around town so they don't become shut-ins.
Then there's some questionable categories. Baby goods has to be at least a department someplace, and might be a full store for cribs/strollers/clothing/etc - the days when it was a department in Toys R Us or the Babies R Us back-to-back with Toys R Us are sadly no more. How about a sporting goods store? I mean, probably at least a department in some store, and it’s entirely possible that the local gun store is also the local sporting goods store and fishing store. Most likely, a music instrument store is also a department in another store - though I’m not sure what, and it might again make sense for it to live on its own (or at least in close proximity to the community center!)
I'm sure there will be various boutique shops that either exist as pop-up shops or simply don't occupy a great deal of square footage, so probably persist without a lot of overhead - it's likely there's a jewelry store, a couple of fashion shops and/or bespoke tailoring, maybe greeting cards and/or arts-and-crafts, a toy store, maybe even some local equivalent to GameStop. There’ll be temporary stores - I expect to see the proverbial Spirit Halloween or similar popup stores that only last a couple months every year. My mental stereotype is that every small town has a trading card store for baseball cards (and these days presumably also Pokemon cards and Magic cards) but perhaps this is just a large display case in some other store like the bookstore or the toystore or the sporting goods store. Come to think of it, this probably all gets rolled into some sort of hobby-and-games store that isn’t a Hobby Lobby but is more the sort of place that sells Warhammer, model trains, remote controlled cars or aircraft or drones, model aircraft, comic books/graphic novels, Dungeons and Dragons, Pokemon, and Magic: the Gathering - it’s basically the geek toy store, if you squint at it. Is there a pawn shop? I think that’s doubtful.
How about a thrift store? My inclination is that the town isn't likely big enough to support it, but maybe. Is there a storage unit facility? It seems like every American town has one, so I expect so - even though I’d think that is less necessary in a relatively rural environment where land is cheaper and you can generally put up a storage shed on your own property, there’s often still the need for heated/dry storage for documents, excess inventory, and the like. And perhaps there’s the need for some small warehouse facilities as well, depending on what businesses actually end up being in town. Do we need a liquor store? That sort of thing is probably just part of the grocery store (and a small selection in a convenience store), although that may make for a rather well stocked wine section depending on how showy your remote workers want to be - I'd just count on doing a lot of special orders if it gets esoteric. How about an ice cream parlor? This might be part of the bakery, or a coffee shop - it's such a seasonal business - or it's slightly common to have it doubled-up with a donut shop - weirdly, Dunkin Donuts and Baskin Robbins are owned by the same parent company, so this happens more than you’d think.
How about pet grooming? Someone might be entrepreneurial enough to do this, I suppose, the cost of entry is low; I suspect it's a side-hustle for someone who is also a veterinarian or the like, or it just lives as part of a pet store (now, I’m not sure this town is big enough for much of a pet store - but upon consideration, there’s probably a small one). Is there a store specifically for “bikes and wheels” (eg, scooters, roller blades/skates/etc, probably also electric cycles)? I suspect this may be too niche, it’s more likely to be a department in some other store. Car wash? Someone will probably put one up - or it’ll be the occasional kiddo fundraiser - but I suspect it’s more likely just adjunct to one of the gas stations. Barber (separate from beauty salon)? Probably yes - women are likely to want to shoo their men and kids off someplace else to get haircuts - though it's not entirely out of place for this to be attached to your exercise facility or your child care facility either, or even have this be a "on-call" service that comes to your house. Is there a specialty exercise facility other than the general one, like a yoga studio targeted at the “mom audience” or a floor-mat dojo for karate or some sort of mixed martial arts instruction? Probably, the cost on that tends to be exceedingly nominal (apart from insurance). Is the town big enough for a real estate agency or an insurance company branch? Or is this just done out of someone's house and a one-room-office? There's almost assuredly some sort of tech repair service for cracked smartphone screens and the like, but I think that lives inside someone else’s business.
Presumably there's some sort of event venue space that can be rented out - for anniversaries, graduation parties, whatever sort of big gathering there might be. Is the town big enough for its own funeral home? Goodness, this one I don't know the economics of. I suspect not, even if there's a graveyard near town. Will there be a hotel? Almost certainly at least a small one - be very inconvenient not to have some sort of facility near an airport - and I’d tend to suspect that in addition to the hotel, there's probably a bed-and-breakfast or similar sort of setup from a couple entrepreneurial sorts, but one should be careful not to let the AirBNB crowd make the place unruly.
Does this town support a florist? (Probably not - it's probably a department in the grocery store or the spa.) A Western Union or similar store? (Probably not as a full store - that's probably just a desk inside the 7-11 or the grocery or the bank.) A payday loans shop or dollar store? Good lord, I hope not; I'd like to think the first can be dealt with by a reputable credit union or bank; the second is generally extremely marginal product value. Is there a paint store? Maybe, or maybe that lives with hardware and tools. For that matter, is there a rental-tool sort of place for large power tools and vehicles? I suppose there might be, or maybe it’s just a department within the overall tools business.
Before I wrap up, let me address a few things. To maintain this sort of standard of living, there’s an implied population of workers here, and lack of (local, affordable) labor is the usual problem with resort towns - when all the high income people move in and build luxury houses, they price out the locals. The support staff outnumber the high income population, and they generally don’t all live in town in the usual resort town environment. But in Littleton - for a handful of reasons - they probably do. In particular, most of the buildings here are likely to be built to a relatively similar style of construction, both to preserve a sort of upscale small town ambiance and to deliberately avoid any class conflict from ghettoization. Most shops will be built in a “mixed use” model with living space above the shop; typically a floor or two of storefront and a couple of floors of apartment/housing above that, allowing the proprietor and their family to live right above their storefront. Parking for residents will need to be available nearby - ideally from an adjoining inobtrusive parking garage, so as to not clutter the street sides, or from frequent alleys with individual small garage to each shop/house for parking and restocking. Similarly, residences for laborers, support staff, and other workers should also be built with attention to detail - upscale exteriors, solid construction, and matching the overall “character” of the town as regards architecture - it’s preferable, as one of the commentors from the Tortuga Society pointed out - that vistors to town should not immediately be able to pick out a particular part of town as being “the lower class section” where all the support staff live.
But that being said - you also definitely need the sort of blue collar support structure that people seem to take for granted as invisible. Plumbers. HVAC. Electricians, mechanics, and welders. Masons. Carpenters, roofers, and handymen. Landscapers. Construction staff in general. People skilled with heavy machinery - that's not one to "learn on the job" - so both a background in civil engineering and some skill actually applying it, which needn't be exactly the same people but they do have to work well together. Which in turn implies an architect or two. But also likely the less stereotypical blue collar roles - if we do assume there’s a hotel in town, that takes its own staff. Is there a laundromat, or a dry cleaner? Depending on where you bring in your knowledge workers (e.g. New York), people may like to "send out their laundry" so that laundromat may actually be a pretty bustling business picking up and dropping off clothing, or it may just be a bank of machines and an attached dry-cleaning shop. There’s definitely a set of “pink collar roles” like maid, nurse, and housekeeper - sizing this is a fairly quick spreadsheet exercise, but it depends a lot on the assumptions about which clientele you have; for example, if there’s both the county hospital and a live-in elderly care facility, you need a lot more nurses than if the assumption is that Grandma gets shipped off to the nearest big city to be at that elderly car facility and near that Big Hospital for when she needs it. So even if those roles don’t always require “a shop” or “an office” - certainly everyone requires at least a place to live.
I don't know if modern American society is likely to put up with a live in housekeeper or nurse. I know it's a thing elsewhere and historically. But that really implies quite a sizable income if you have a staff of servants, more than you're likely to run on a single remote income or even moderate jobstacking. At least assuming you're paying your servants a useful wage so that they can in turn have a family, and then where do *they* live, etc? No, you're not going to hear me advocating Downton Abbey (also, I've never watched it, though - as if to fulfill the stereotype - my wife has). But you want “your people” to be accessible, and admiring but not resentful of your own lifestyle. So in general there does need to be secondary housing, it should be quality-if-mostly-smaller (or the proverbial apartment-above--the-store), and there'll also be quite a number of farmhouses and the like surrounding town that aren't the imported remote workers or the town workers themselves.
Ideally a lot of the waiters, landscapers, babysitters, etc. will be children of the people that live there. Pronatal policies are a premise of the plan for Littleton in general (and largely essential for society to be overall sustainable) - but one of the best is simply for there to be reasonable opportunities for the future and viable lifestyles for young families. So to a certain extent, you want to encourage parents to instill some level of work ethic and expectation regardless of socioeconomic background - with the expectation that some of this is going to be the nontraditional ad hoc “kid jobs” like paid tutoring, dogwalking, and babysitting or seasonal work like the pop-up halloween store; you do to a certain extent need to work around the schedules demanded by the needs for kids sports and their own tutoring / scouting needs, etc. But as an example - if you have any sort of trad faction you should have no trouble finding babysitters; which is basically an example of societal culture - comparably, expecting kids to have a ten-hour-a-week job/learning-apprencticeship of is mostly a matter of making that the cultural norm. And there are many jobs that will be particularly prestigious amongst young ones - if you think this sounds unlikely, spend half a moment envisioning how much of a fight there’s likely to be amongst social-climber teen girls over who gets to be the part-time staff at the beauty salon and the spa, or who gets to train the other young equestriennes? Likewise, you probably get some similar work ethic (and college volunteer credit) by institutionalizing Scouting and volunteer efforts at the library, scholastic or occupational tutoring, and whatever level of assistance can be reasonably provided at the retirement home or the hospital - or to the local businesses, or parks and local civic needs - perhaps again in conjunction with earning a Scout merit badge and/or to fill a school volunteer credit.
I'm assuming that in most cases this sort of thing is not creating a new town literally ex nihilo, but sort of revitalizing one or augmenting one by injecting a lot of wealth and development, so you can't necessarily say "hey, you don't need a public school so we're not going to build one / we're going to close it.” Mind you, if you’re moving into an existing town of six thousand people, this isn’t going to displace existing public schools - if the current town is eight hundred people, you may very well offer child currently there scholarships to Littleton Academy - and if it’s a couple thousand people, perhaps you have both a public and private school system, but I’d think carefully about how to thread that needle so as to not have a bunch of disaffected kids.
In general I think it’s wise for there to be an extensive scholarship program for the locals to send their kids to Littleton Academy; offering them the implicit social mobility that comes with an educational boost is probably a good move to keep down the potential class strife. Similarly, there’s some level of egalitarian movement from clubs and organizations (teams, Scouts, cooperative efforts, internships, et al). There's going to be some inevitable difficulties during the teen years when lower-status kids set their sights on “marrying up” and hell if I know how to deal with that, any suggestions are welcome - yes, we’ve already thought of “good birth control!”
Cultists like the Bhagwan who have started their own town - or historical company towns - or heck, the rather outrageous overhaul of Oak Ridge Tennessee for the Manhattan Project - all leave me a bit leery about engineered towns. But I think if properly planned for the long term - and I think by in large we’re likely to be skeptical about cults, or becoming overly dependent on any one employer - still leave me optimistic that this is a promising path to follow.
For the record, I had general thoughts (again, for various reasons, not all of which are necessarily applicable here) of putting this on or near the Great Lakes. Certainly, wherever you put it, you definitely need a friendly local and county government (and state government that won't mess this all up) or at very least, a careful public private partnership with the existing political structure / town hall- and if you put this in the Midwest, as I suspect, you probably want good relations with the local Indian reservation/tribe/jurisdiction too. It would some reasons possibly be a good decision to have a local Amish or similar community as well that you trade with - but that’s probably a different article.
As mentioned - we’d talked about possibly putting this together in something modeled after a ski town (my wife and I had seen another group trying to do this sort of concept earlier and as noted above, it didn’t “grab us”). Now if you think a ski community might actually be not the greatest place to raise your kids unless you were 100% sure they were going to be into winter sports - you’re correct - and even then, it tends to get overrun with tourists, which isn’t necessarily ideal if you want to keep the small-town community feel most of the time. We made a point of holidaying in a ski community one during the summer to see what it was like. It was kind of an entertaining twist as they turned it into a downhill mountain biking community and lots of interesting mountain hiking opportunities. It was fun for a few days. A lot of the shops were very poorly staffed. We got exceedingly good service from the bored waitstaff (and they went gaga for good tips). We saw everything there was to see in the first few days, did a couple helicopter tours, exhausted ourselves with hiking, and mostly had a quiet time. It’s still fun to make out on the polar bear rug in front of the fire in your room at the ski lodge even if if's not downhill season, but we definitely came to the conclusion that that we’d rather have lakefront rather than mountains. I’m not a “boat guy” - personally I’m fond of the quip that a boat is a hole in the water that you pour money into - but I know a great number of people would want some level of ability to fish or otherwise engage in water-based recreation; as for myself, I just find it relaxing/scenic.
My plans for Littleton (as originally put together) actually got somewhat more outrageous from here - because I had a couple particular things in mind for Littleton and the people I was intending to import, other than just “a place to park my knowledge workers”. But I think this might give you a good jumping off point to start from for your own ponderings.
This appears to be a very effective societal blueprint. The Hot Circuits article shall be arriving shortly!
There’s a guy outside of Bishop CA who is rebuilding a ghost town - interesting template
https://youtu.be/NZulDyerzrA?si=pnqwsO_j86ArN_Nz