"But..." And then Reno sighed. "I ain't actually been to Nibelheim in the past few years," he noted. "Hard to say what shape it's in now, yo. Might not do you any good at all."

Or, alternatively, the ShinRa employees that had been used to populate the town might have just up and decided to make it home now, and live in it as if everything was perfectly normal. It should have been simple enough to do, since that was what their orders had been in the first place.