When they build a town, in what order do they build things generally? E.g. roads, sewer, residences, schools, electric cabling, post office, etc etc.
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Technically, a town doesn’t exist until it has been incorporated. By the time this happens, there’s usually a notable community of businesses and residences.
In most cases, roads and electric will exist just by towns usually being built between connected cities. You’ll notice most historic downtowns have two main exits, usually a single long road connecting them or a port of some sort. Even now, new towns usually form by spreading off from a main highway.
You may also notice some places have multiple city names that a post office will even gladly deliver to. This mostly has to do with the fact post offices don’t care about anything but street number, street name, and zip code. This also happens when a “town” isn’t actually a town – but an unincorporated census designated place.
It usually takes time before these CDPs become incorporated, but until then it’s not unusual for these places to have recognition by the governing county as a respected region. Some even go as far as to put that region on county cop cars for use only in that region (but don’t let it fool you – they’re still usually county police and have wide jurisdictions)
Once a town is incorporated, they’ll be expected to handle many matters that the county once did – founding law enforcement, fire rescue, a town hall for employees to do their jobs. These aren’t necessary, however it would be unusual and mostly pointless for a town to even incorporate unless their goal is to manage their own finances and services.
At that point, they’ll be able to receive their share of taxes (and in some states, levy their own), to build out services intended for residents and visitors. This is also why newer CDPs delay incorporation – the longer they can feed off the income of the county the more likely they can build successfully. It does mean slower building though – as they need county approval to do anything with the counties money – something they otherwise won’t need to get permission for as a town.
tl;dr a town is formed when a region establishes its own government, so the order of services built is largely irrelevant.
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