In fact, the average western small town grew 7.8 percent in those seven years, which is roughly the same healthy pace of growth registered in western towns and cities from the smallest to the largest. With a nod to Mark Twain, the message here is that reports of the death of small towns, at least in the West, have been greatly exaggerated.
I don’t mean to minimize the challenges small towns face, because they are considerable, or suggest that western small towns are immune to them, because they certainly are not.