In the current world, it was rare for people to live outside the cities and towns, since those were the only places one could get work. The higher tier the city or town, the higher the average pay would be. If they could afford it, people would live in the cities, yet it wasn’t rare for the majority of the workforce to commute to work from a nearby town due to the high rent cost inside the city.
Of course, the Tier-5 ‘towns’ barely deserved such a name. They were essentially just giant dumps that housed people who had nothing and lived off of the scraps of the other cities. It was to the point that their ‘houses’ consisted of whatever materials the other cities had discarded, and they could slap together.
These cities were why the AFC Academy, more commonly known as the AFA, was a unique place.