A hundred years ago, we'd buy the land elsewhere a lot cheaper and build our own town.
I dunno how big a town you want, but I'm sure we could find a fair chunk of land a lot cheaper than that, that could be platted and made into a town.
Course you'd have to build everything from scratch, and scrounge up something resembling utilities. For years there was a town out east of here that got all their water in railroad tank cars. When the railroad quit in the 1980s, they had to drill a well.
I know where there's a town that has exactly one building left which was the old school. All the other buildings were torn down for the lumber but the school was govt owned so they had to leave it. I dunno who owns the land but I reckon it's part of some big ranch because that's all there is out there. Back in the homestead days it was a pretty active place, till everyone finally starved out during the dustbowl era.
Heck, the ranch that got flooded out down on the river used to be a little town. Our neighbors up country used to take their wheat down through our place in a horse drawn wagon and sell it there and bring back store bought supplies. In those days you could jump on the train and ride to anywhere in the country, so we are really more isolated than back then. The railroad had a nice shallow well that we filled our fire trucks from (courtesy of the guy who owns it now) but the flood this spring filled the well with mud :(
The USPO just released a list of about 80 towns in Montana where they were considering closing the post offices (and deleting the zip code too I guess :( ).
