Choosing Your Best City
Now that you’ve toured the country with SMW, you’re probably wondering: How do I choose my best city?
While we can help with the major categories, your personal preferences will also factor in. For example, if snow is a must-have, Phoenix most likely won’t be a favorite. Meanwhile, if you crave wide open spaces, New York City may not be the best choice.
However, by weighing what you want in the context of what SingleMindedWomen.com’s Top 10 Cities for Single Women offer, you should be able to find a location that satisfies most of your requirements—and will be a place you can call home.
Sources of Info
We would like to acknowledge Sperling’s BestPlaces, which we referenced for cost of living, using New York as our benchmark city.
Sperling’s factors housing (31 percent), food/groceries (16 percent), transportation (10 percent), utilities (8 percent), health (5 percent), and miscellaneous (30 percent) into its cost of living analysis and uses a variety of resources. These resources include published and unpublished data from the Consumer Price Index, Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS); health costs from Medicare and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; the Consumer Expenditure Survey (BLS); Current Population Survey (BLS), Department of Energy; the Federal Travel Directory; National Association of Realtors; Home Price Mortgage Index from Freddie Mac; median home sales prices from state realtor associations and county deed records; Coldwell Banker’s Home Price Index; and Sperling’s own research. Sperling’s tells us most metrics have been updated in the past three to six months.
We utilized Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) to look at industries with projected growth and compared this data to top industries in major cities. To analyze industries within cities, we relied on numerous sources, including Wikipedia, City-Data.com, and individual city websites.
BLS metropolitan summary analysis provided unemployment information. BLS data and Census Bureau data was also a source of population information, particularly with regard to the ratio of women to men. We relied on Google Maps mashups for singles population data.
Interestingly, it is difficult to find comprehensive data that provides accurate breakdowns of the number of single women to single men. We found most numbers are based on small segments of the populations or outright estimates. Therefore, we chose to share information about the mix of the overall population and the singles population separately. We would like to point out, however, that our own spot analysis finds the ratio of single women to single men tends to be relatively consistent with the overall population; in other words, if the ratio of women to men is approximately 50-50, the ratio of singles is typically in proportion.
Other sources of information include Craigslist and real estate websites (for housing information); airport websites; various state and city websites for park, recreation, arts, and entertainment information and links; college and university websites; and again, Wikipedia. Google Maps was a tremendous asset in terms of analyzing distance and providing geographical information and reference points.
