Ya caught me. My 15 years of road trips across the US, moving across multiple states, and frequent visits to the UK have made me ill-equipped to comment on the state of US cities and villages. Dang. I thought I could get away with it too.
Were your eyes open? Sorry to poke but your original comment paints America as a pendulum when it really isn’t. From someone who’s lived across the Southeast, it’s so weird to read that statement said so confidently when it’s just not true. Plenty of small towns and small cities that aren’t depressing.
I've lived in the southeast for 2/3 of my life, and ride my bike 10,000-12,000 mi/year, largely drawn in by charming rural towns. It's a lot of what keeps me engaged with the sport.
I would nevertheless agree with the parent to whom you are replying that they are the exception, not the rule, and much of rural America is depressed or just a whole lot of nothing, at least from the perspective of charm. Most places there, too, are built at automobile scale, and lack sufficient sense of placehood or definition to qualify as anything like a hamlet in the European sense. It's just a ZIP code with a Circle K, a church, and a some houses scattered over an obscenely large area that can only be traversed by car. Sometimes, boarded up historical relics are included, although you may have to drive quite a bit from the civic centre (the Circle K) to find them.
Food deserts, in which the Circle K feeds a massive radius (along with perhaps a Dollar General), are the norm. Getting from the Circle K to the Dollar General requires a car. In between, there's not much.
There are some delightful exceptions, and I love to visit and capture their splendid sights and sounds. They are few and far, and I find the parent's generalisation highly valid, at least as the Sourheast goes. I grew up in the Midwest and had a similar sense there. Perhaps the West Coast and New England are quite different, and it sounds like they are. "Flyover country" has little to recommend it in the whole, however, and there's a reason they call it that.
For what it's worth I find that college towns are usually quite pleasant, though I'm not sure they match the small size the poster is thinking of here. New England has some charming towns (example: Bath, Maine).
But one of the elements of "charm" is narrow, walkable streets, and _those_ are rare in the US outside of New England. Where they once existed they've often been bulldozed.
https://www.strongtowns.org/ talks a lot about what makes towns great and as it turns out those characteristics also tend to make them charming.
