Charleston, SC Ranked as 19th Best City for Single Men in latest study

Lending Tree has just released its ranking of the Top cities for Single Men for 2019. The study ranked 100 metropolitan areas. Charleston, South Carolina came up higher than you may think. Our ranking was #19, putting us in the top 20% of all U.S. cities analyzed.

Top 20 Best Places for Single Men

Worst 10 Places for Single Men

US Demographic Map

Factors in Analysis

For the study, we considered a range of variables to evaluate which of the 100 largest metropolitan areas would be the most friendly to single, working men. We grouped the variables into five categories and evaluated each metro area according to those categories.

• Demographics: A city that is welcoming to single men will also have plenty of other single adults. We pulled data on the percentage of 20- to 50-year-olds that are single men, as well as analyzed how balanced the gender ratio is between 20- to 50-year-old single men and women. Too many women to men suggests a city less geared to men, while too many men to women suggests slimmer dating opportunities. The best cities for single men would need a close-to-even gender ratio.
• Economics: We evaluated the unemployment rate, median annual income and homeownership rate for single, working men to determine how good the economic prospects are in each metro area.
• Well-being: This score was determined by the percentage of people who have access to healthy food, exercise facilities and whether that access is useful enough to result in people participating in a healthy lifestyle. Additionally, since long commutes are often found to add to stress levels, we looked at the percentage of the population with long commutes.
• Culture and entertainment: We looked at how many bars, restaurants, sports clubs and teams each city had per capita, along with the number of museums and performing arts establishments. The museums and performing arts places were evaluated on both a total and per capita basis, averaging over both measures to create a single arts institution value and a museum value. We used the total number for museums and performing arts institutions because people tend to travel across the city to visit these places, rather than just staying in their neighborhood. Therefore, a higher total number is a plus, as it reflects a greater variety of cultural and entertainment activities.
• Safety: This score was based on violent crime rate data, which was used to determine how low the crime rate is in each city.

Methodology

LendingTree analysts used data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2017 Five-year American Community Survey to gather the demographic and economic measures, except for the homeownership rate, which comes from the 2010 decennial census.

The gender ratio, one of the two variables used to compose the demographics score, is calculated by comparing the number of 20- to 50-year-old unmarried men to the number of 20- to 50-year-old unmarried women. The smaller of the two numbers is then divided by the larger number to create the ratio.

The health measures and violent crime rate data were pulled from the County Health Rankings and Roadmaps program. The culture and entertainment measures come from the Census Bureau’s 2016 County Business Patterns data sets.

Each variable was given a value according to its relative location between the highest and lowest values. The variable values in each category were then averaged to create the category score. The final score is an average over all five category scores.