Now that's, fantasy culture shock
...have you read the previous chapters?
It's because when the event started, everybody nake refuge at the city and continue to be populated because of that. The reason why the village aren't bustling because it's literally a wild borderlands. Only those have powers can survive. So the only people that can survive are those that have the powers i.e people that lived there since the apocalypse.
They're now trying to "tame" the nature so that people could repopulate the villages. You saw the armored train, no?