It’s become a veritable truism that cities are cold, lonely places and that small towns are the centers of a more connected, communal life. This view is wrong, according to the growing field of “loneliness” research, which finds that the notion of urban alienation is more fiction then fact.
How many apartments in Manhattan would you have guessed have just one occupant? One of every eight? Every four? Every three? The number’s one of every two. Of all 3,141 counties in the United States, New York County is the unrivaled leader in single-individual households, at 50.6 percent. More than three-quarters of the people in them are below the age of 65. Fifty-seven percent are female. In Brooklyn, the overall number is considerably lower, at 29.5 percent, and Queens is 26.1. But on the whole, in New York City, one in three homes contains a single dweller, just one lone man or woman who flips on the coffeemaker in the morning and switches off the lights at night.
These numbers should tell an unambiguous story. They should confirm the common belief about our city, which is that New York is an isolating, coldhearted sort of place… In American lore, the small town is the archetypal community, a state of grace from which city dwellers have fallen… Yet the picture of cities—and New York in particular—that has been emerging from the work of social scientists is that the people living in them are actually less lonely. Rather than driving people apart, large population centers pull them together, and as a rule tend to possess greater community virtues than smaller ones. This, even though cities are consistently, overwhelmingly, places where people are more likely to live on their own.
Much more here (h/t: Brian Knudsen).