>>17015279its not a town though, it's sort of an in between thing.
There would still be trainers to fight and wild pokemon in the grass, it just has the skin of suburbia.
The idea was that we don't want to run into the problem of having every other route be a generic green grassland, so i thought that since it's leading to the big sprawling metropolis that is to be the industrial city, it could be suburbia where bored middle class kids and disgruntled people coming back from work would battle you.
tl;dr I just didnt want another generic green grassland like the other route 7 idea.