That's exactly the point.

The areas where you could easily do something that provides work for a lot of people are already occupied by large cities, near river deltas, trade routes and coastal areas good for ports.

The only recent exception is SpaceX's Starbase town. And they could do this because of a very new 'requirement', frequently launch rockets where you have a south facing coastline as close as possible to the equator.

Company towns are built because there is e.g. a mine in the middle of nowhere and then you have to build a town to support all the mine workers. If there was actually something like a viable mine there then it would happen on its own and if there isn't then it's still just a bunch of empty buildings in the desert.