Talk:Phantom settlement

Real estate booms?

What about suburbs built (or partially built) during real estate booms but never occupied? Are they phantom settlements or ghost towns? Allens (talk) 12:01, 26 January 2012 (UTC)

According to my understanding of current usage I would say they are NOT phantom settlements but whether they might fit in Ghost town I am not so clear. There might be problems there as Ghost towns might need some ghosts and if noone ever lived there one might be reliant on the all too frequent casualties in the building trade. A new term may be needed! (Msrasnw (talk) 14:14, 26 January 2012 (UTC))

A suburb is built as a non-notable part of an existing larger settlement. The larger town to which it was trying to attach itself still exists, so one dead suburb in an otherwise active city does not make a free-standing ghost town. One exception would be Two Guns, Arizona, a former U.S. Route 66 tourist stop built as a suburb of lawless railroad town Canyon Diablo, Arizona. Canyon Diablo is no longer a populated place so it may be listed as a ghost town, two guns and all.

Certainly there are entities smaller than an entire town that qualify as "ghost (whatever)", such as Lower Bay station (Toronto Transit Commission) as a ghost station in some town that for whatever reason isn't on list of ghost towns in Ontario quite yet. There are dead shopping malls, the most infamous being the Dixie Square Mall in which the Blues Brothers led a movie car chase in Harvey, Illinois. Located in an economically-depressed area, the abandoned mall was left to crumble for decades. There are ghost tourist courts, roadside stops on the old U.S. Route 66 like John's Modern Cabins which were simply abandoned but which do not qualify as towns. Arlington, Missouri has (what's left of) an entire "ghost resort" as a once-popular recreation area near Fort Leonard Wood which was put out of business when the road was first widened (requiring demolition of many structures) then re-routed away from the site, with the road bridge that originally brought US 66 to the resort now demolished.

Sub-municipal "ghost" entities may be notable but these "ghost ___(whatever)___" entities are not full "ghost towns" in their own right. The term "ghost estates" is in use in English for suburbs abandoned during a market collapse per WP:RS here. 66.102.83.61 (talk) 15:42, 26 May 2012 (UTC)

Generally speaking, this is considered a paper town, or abandoned settlement. Stargirl28 (talk) 19:28, 21 November 2019 (UTC)

Change title

Would it be better to change the title of this article from Phantom Settlement to Paper Town ans the phrase paper town is more widely used? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Dinosaur Rider (talk • contribs) 01:40, 28 January 2018 (UTC)