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Looking for Love in All the Right Places

By Chris Sipola on 10 Feb 2015

Valentine’s Day is right around the corner. This could mean romantic bliss for you and a loved one, or frustration and loneliness if you’ve been unlucky in love this year.

If you are having trouble finding a date in your hometown and are up to move or explore options in a different city (in other words, you’re “in the move for love”), Zillow Research has your back. We’ve waded through all the data to determine the best cities (ones that have a population of over 250,000) in which to find love.

We scored these cities on four metrics[1]:

• Percentage of population who’s single:
  • Dating is tough if everyone’s already put a ring on it. To determine the percentage of the population that’s unmarried, we used Census ACS 2013 data on the number of married and unmarried residents.
• Percentage of population who’s new and single:
  • Even if you live in a huge city with plenty of singles, you may benefit from an influx of fresh, single faces to prevent a dating scene where everyone knows everyone. And if you’re a newcomer yourself, it may be easier to connect with other single out-of-towners instead of trying to infiltrate established cliques. For this metric, we used ACS 2013 data on the number of unmarried residents who moved from outside the county in the past year.
• Date spots per 10,000 residents:
  • Restaurants, bars, nightclubs, coffee shops, live music hangouts, theaters and parks all make for great date spots, or just places to meet friends old and new and get to know each other better or meet someone special. To approximate the number of potential date spots per 10,000 residents, we used Census County Business Patterns 2012 data on the number of establishments that fall into the categories mentioned above.[2]
• Disposable income:
  • To enjoy these venues, you and your date will need some spending money. To approximate disposable income, we took ACS 2013 data for the median nonfamily household income of those living alone and subtracted the rent one may expect to pay over the course of a year (calculated as the annualized Zillow Rent Index).

Check out the interactive tool below to find the best city near you, and put yourself out there!

Who loves ya, baby? Zillow Research. Happy Valentine’s Day!

[1] The raw metrics were transformed (so that extreme values didn’t overwhelm the index) and then normalized so each had a mean of zero and a standard deviation of one. They were then combined to make the composite index, with the second metric having half the weight of the others since it serves a similar purpose to the first. For the graph, the transformed metrics and the composite index were scaled to be between zero and ten to make comparisons between metrics easier.

[2] Because the data are at the county level, we divided the number of relevant establishments by the county population (and multiplied by 10,000), and then assigned the same county-level number to each city within that county. Or, in the case of cities spanning multiple counties (like New York City), we summed the number of relevant establishments within the counties, divided by the sum of the populations of those counties, and multiplied by 10,000.