I’ve been brainstorming several different ways of spreading out and growing my towns. The biggest impeding factor is resource management, desirability and terrain levels. To that end, I have found that making smaller satellite communities that are all but self-contained yet still connected to the central town hall. Sometimes it works like a charm, other times it utterly fails. I’m trying to cut down on travel times but it still seems like those people who move into the outlying towns and areas still want to take jobs far across the map. While I realize that people in modern times do this I was wondering if any of you also build smaller towns away from the city center and if so, what do you put in them and do you also get the people who take jobs far from their homes?
I haven’t done this yet, but it’s crossed my mind 
like you said - people do take jobs across town (in real life) - so I just accept any “quirks” like that as part of my settlers choice, rather than forcing certain villagers to certain jobs.
I also currently use the second shelter type for “satellite” areas.
I try. Every time. It doesn’t work well.
The biggest annoyance for me is that building new houses seems to shuffle the existing occupants of all homes so your teacher suddenly lives in frozen coal mining town No. 1 halfway up a mountain for no reason.
I also have trouble because I cannot emotionally accept how the wagons work. Intellectually I know that they do very specific work but I still expect them to stock heavy freight from storage buildings to production buildings despite that not being how they work.
The most success I’ve had so far is by building a work camp and temporary shelter halfway between town and where I want to be. Then raw material storage at site, food storage then food production, then houses. I still ended up with every single rat catcher in town moving down to the new village but rat catchers spend so much time arsing about anyway it didn’t really matter.
No matter what though, you absolutely cannot build satellite farms. Farmers have no sense of scale and will try to work every single farm on the map no matter the distance. I think they are a digging based cult. They revel in the purity of the work. The harvest that sustains the town is just an annoying by product of their true spiritual and digging journey.
This was beautiful to read haha