Ulster County is the 25th best metro areas for singles in the country. What exciting news!
“Spring is in the air, the weather is warming, and it’s only a matter of time before summer is upon us,” a full-service rental platform called Zumper tells us. “Maybe you’re in the market for a summer fling? A serious relationship?” Zumper provides you a list of the best metro areas for the 121 million unmarried men and women in the country.
Before you follow Zumper’s advice and buy your ticket to Kingston, you might want to know how Zumper compiled its five-item list. And when you look at the metrics the San Francisco-based startup used, you might even want to improve on them. Make your own list. Sell it to people who might be interested.
Census data provides the first metric, the percentage of men and women aged 18-35 who are unmarried in each of the 382 metropolitan areas of the United States. Who knew the young people of Pittsfield, Massachusetts area were most likely to be single (83 percent)? Ulster County, at 81 percent, tied with four other metros for second place.
The second metric is the percentage of people with a bachelor’s degree or higher. At 21 percent, Ulster County is alas next-to-last-ranked among the top 25 metros in this category. The top scorers, Boston and San Francisco with 41 percent each, appear almost twice as brainy as poor Ulster County.
Ulster County does far better when it comes to the number of restaurants and bars per capita, its rating of 32.3 fourth among the best 25 behind Cape Cod at 46.8, Pittsfield at 37.6 and San Francisco at 32.4.
The clever Zumper packagers didn’t know how to rate access to dating apps, so they used percentage of households with an Internet subscription as a substitute. Ulster County was next to last in this fourth criterion, its 78 percent only ahead of Champaign-Urbana with 77 percent.
Unsurprisingly for a real-estate-app company, Zumper used median rent for a one-bedroom apartment as its final metric. With a monthly median rent of $980 per month, Ulster County fell somewhere in the middle of the top-25 pack, less than half the price of the big-city contenders and modestly higher than some of the other smaller metros.
Zumper weighted the factors as follows: The percentage of singles and the educational score each accounted for a quarter of the final grade, restaurants and app accessibility 20 percent each, and the rental price ten percent. There was an adjustment for gender specificity. And finally every contending metro was given a final grade, just as they received in school. As 25th in the ranks of the 382 vying for the title of best urban metros for singles, Ulster County received a grade of B+.
A charming combination poised on the boundary between data science and wish fulfillment, the Zumper analysis is the perfect instrument for a digital generation. Moreover, it could be customized in any number of ways. Singles, colleges, restaurant owners and app designers could join together in a holy brotherhood and market the hell out of a formerly rural county in which people had to meet each other on the streets, whether for a summer fling or a serious relationship.
Join the family! 
