Data mapping singles

Just in time for Valentine's Day, the Trulia trends blog on the website trulia.com (slogan: real estate data for the rest of us) has mapped men and women living alone in US metropolitan areas including New York, LA, San Francisco, Chicago, and Washington DC. In case you can't read the maps or don't know the cities well enough, the data are also available by website. Some insights:

What do these neighborhoods have in common? Billy Joel was right: in most metros, the neighborhood with the highest ratio of men to women is in or near downtown, as well as in recently redeveloped neighborhoods like Boston’s Waterfront or Long Island City. Even man-rich Rosslyn is a major employment center despite being in northern Virginia, outside of Washington D.C.

The neighborhoods with the highest ratio of women to men tend to be more residential, like San Francisco’s Marina and Seattle’s Queen Anne, and more upscale (and safe), like the Upper East Side and Upper Connecticut Avenue. Some are near major retail centers, like Chicago’s Near North Side, the Beverly Center in LA, and Atlanta’s Perimeter Mall, though Houston’s Great Uptown neighborhood — which skews toward men — is near the Galleria, Texas’s largest mall.

A couple of notes: there's a brief and clear data explanation at the end of the post. And these are maps of straight men and women; the blog has a related post, "Welcome to the Gayborhood" equally useful though sadly without rainbow-colored maps.