very little, i think. I join them when i use it in a compound noun. For Example That is my home town That is my hometown football team. contracting the two nouns helps to avoid an unpleasantly long compound noun.

I don't think there's any. It's just a pair of words that's making the process of transformation from a colocation to a compound word. Furthermore, the hyphenated form, home-town, was also used in the past--I just checked and it is, for example, used in Hendrik Van Loon's "The Story of Mankind," a 1921 bestseller.