The map below shows which cities have a surplus of single men and single women. 

In keeping with the spirit of this holiday weekend, here’s a fun list of how Canada’s metros stack up on our Trick-or-Treater Index. While of course all the metros are likely to have great neighborhoods for trick-or-treating, the original index we did for the United States generated so much interest that my MPI colleagues and I decided to do a similar one for Canada.

It’s based on five key criteria, all similar to the ones we used for the U.S. index.

A good place for trick-or-treating needs lots of kids, so we used the percentage of the population that is 5 to 14 years old. The haul is likely to be better where people have more money, so we included average income. It’s easier to canvass neighborhoods that are walkable so we measured the share of people who walk to work — and also those that have a greater density of population. And then there’s that hard-to-miss Halloween spirit. The most over-the-top costumes and celebrations often occur in artistic neighborhoods, so we included the fraction of artists, designers, and other cultural creatives. My colleagues Kevin Stolarick and Zara Matheson extracted the data, Charlotta Mellander crunched the numbers, Michelle Hopgood did the graphics, and Zara made the maps – all on tight turnaround.

As I explained in my original post:

The idea for the Trick-or-Treater Index came to me several years ago, right after my wife and I spent our first Halloween in Toronto and I wrote about it in Who’s Your City?. I’d lived in many urban neighborhoods in the United States in New York, Boston, D.C., Pittsburgh, Columbus, and Buffalo, and frankly had never seen many trick-or-treaters. Maybe I lived in the wrong kind of places — perhaps too trendy when I was younger or perhaps a bit too far removed from the beaten track as I got older. But it could have been something else, too. Because of real or imagined dangers in urban communities, many parents don’t let their kids go up to houses where they don’t know people, and are more likely to create supervised parties or trick-or-treating rituals for their kids. Nearly half of all children in the United States live in places where their parents fear that neighbors may be a bad influence, and more than one in five are kept indoors because they live in dangerous neighborhoods, according to a 2007 Census study reported in The New York Times.

But our house in Toronto is always mobbed with kids trick-or-treating, from teeny tots to tweens and teens, many of them going it on their own without parents along to supervise. And our house was not in some far-off suburb, but rather in a residential neighbourhood of older single-family homes, about two miles from downtown. I later learned that Catherine Austin Fitts, a former assistant secretary of Housing and Urban Development, came up with a similar index — the Popsicle Index — which she describes as the percentage of people in a community who feel that a child can leave home safely to buy a Popsicle.

This is the longer, unedited version of my column in today’s Wall Street Journal.

Remaking our sprawling suburbs, with their enormous footprints, shoddy construction, hastily put up infrastructure, and dying malls, is shaping up to be the biggest urban revitalization challenge of modern times—far larger in scale, scope and cost than the revitalization of our inner cities.

What a dramatic shift. Just a couple of decades ago, the suburbs were the locus of the American Dream. More than their sprawling, large-lot homes and big wide lawns, their shopping malls, industrial parks, and office campuses accounted for a growing percentage of the nation’s economic output.  A good many of them formed into Edge Cities—satellite centers where people could live, work, and shop without ever having to set foot in the center city.

With millions of homes underwater or in foreclosure, our suburbs and exurbs have taken some of the most visible hits from the great recession. In a stunning reversal, big cities like New York, Boston, Washington, D.C., Chicago, San Francisco, and Seattle have become talent magnets at the same time, drawing ambitious people, empty-nesters, young-families, and even a growing number of offices back to their downtown cores. As inner city neighborhoods are being gentrified, blight and intransigent poverty are moving out to the suburbs, where one third of the nation’s poor now reside—1.5 million more than in cities, according to a Brookings study. And suburban poverty populations are growing at five times the rate of those in cities.

I myself am a card-carrying, dyed-in-the-wool urbanist; I’ve lived in inner-cities for most of my adult life. But I believe my urbanist fellow travelers are making a big mistake when they impugn suburbanization wholesale. Suburbs don’t always grow at the expense of cities; suburbanization and urbanization alike are parts of a larger process. Studies reveal that, counterintuitively, suburbs don’t draw most of their populations from the inner city, but grow by attracting people from small towns and rural areas further out, as well as immigrants from foreign countries, more than 50 percent of whom bypass cities and settle directly in the suburbs of larger metro areas, according to research by Brookings’ Audrey Singer.

Great metropolitan areas are like economic suns; their gravitational appeal is irresistible. Suburbs and cities are mutually dependent; they blur into each other at the margins. And the most successful suburbs share many attributes with the best urban neighborhoods: walkability, vibrant street life, density, diversity.

Density, the clustering of people and firms, is a basic engine of economic life—for cities, suburbs, and nations. When interesting people rub against each other, they spark new ideas; the clustering of economic assets and activities accelerates the formation of new entrepreneurial enterprises and dramatically increases overall productivity.

The idea that such clustering only happens in Manhattan-style urban centers is shortsighted and parochial—it’s characteristic of Silicon Valley too, and Nashville, whose cluster of musicians, composers, studios, publishers, and record companies has made it the most concentrated center of commercial music-making in the world. But we need more of it and too many of our suburbs and exurbs don’t have much of it at all. The key to our suburbs’ renewal is not beautification but densification. As our suburbs become more clustered, they’ll become more economically energetic—with benefits for us all.

Renewing our suburbs is part and parcel of broader economic recovery. The very act of restoring them—of retrofitting them for the new ways of living and working that our emerging new economic order requires–will help bring back prosperity overall.

Sources: Map by Zara Matheson of the Martin Prosperity Institute. Data from Christopher Leinberger.

~ ~ ~

Though some of our most stressed suburbs might have passed the tipping point— like those brand new unsaleable houses on the far-out fringes of L.A. that were bulldozed to the ground not too long ago, double-paned windows, granite countertops, whirlpool baths, and all—most of them aren’t going to fade away. Just over half of Americans live in the suburbs, and the great majority of them are content to stay. More than two-thirds (68 percent) of suburbanites are “satisfied” or “very satisfied” with where they live; 57 percent rated their communities as the “best” or “near-best,” according to a survey I conducted with the Gallup Organization and report in my book Who’s Your City? A separate Pew survey identified the group of Americans that is most satisfied with their living choices as college-educated suburbanites–62 percent of whom said there was no better place for them to live.

Even before the recession, our changing demography had begun to alter the texture of suburban life in favor of denser, more walkable, mixed-use communities. Ozzie and Harriet stereotypes notwithstanding, the average age of marriage has been rising, households have gotten smaller, and single people now outnumber marrieds. Only about one in five American households consists of two parents with children living at home, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Many baby boomers who are in their empty-nester phase are looking to downsize, and younger Americans faced with a stagnant economy are putting off having families a little longer and are staying put in their apartments or moving home with mom and dad.

The recession accelerated this process of change. Much has been made of the shift to a so-called “new normal” where consumers scale back on debt, purchase less material things, spend more time with family and friends, and seek greater meaning in their lives. It may sound like the wishful thinking of crunchy granola, ivory tower pundits —only it really is happening. Even builders and realtors have taken notice. According to an eye-opening 2009 survey commissioned by Builder magazine, home buyers are no longer willing to drive to the furthest edges of developments to buy the biggest house they can afford. In fact those are precisely the kinds of homes that are not selling.  Real estate development expert Arthur C. Nelson predicts that we will have a surplus of as many as 22 million large-lot homes by the year 2025.

Today’s buyers—surprising numbers of them single women— are looking for smaller houses closer-in, with access to parks and cultural amenities. There is a rapidly growing market for super-energy efficient homes under 1,300 square feet – quite a departure from the 5,000-6,000 square foot McMansions of just a few years past. “We are entering a new era of home building, where buyers look for spiritual satisfaction rather than material gain,” the Builder study concludes. Not the kind of language we’re used to hearing from the construction industry.

While most suburbanites are happy with where they live, growing numbers are increasingly unhappy with how much time they’ve been spending in their cars. More than half of Americans would prefer to walk more and drive less, a 2003 national survey reported, and more than a third would prefer to live in walkable communities, according to research by Jonathan Levine of the University of Michigan and his collaborators. Commuting by car is not only time-consuming and expensive, according to research by the Nobel prize winning economist Daniel Kahneman, it is also one of life’s least enjoyable activities. Most suburbanites don’t want to move to the city; they’d like the best aspects of city life—its liveliness, its amenities, its walkability—to come to them.

Sources: Analysis by Patrick Adler; graphics by Michelle Hopgood of the Martin Prosperity Institute. List of walkable suburbs from Christopher Leinberger. Human capital refers to adults with a bachelor’s degree or more; travel time to work is one-way travel from work to home. Human capital, income, and travel time to work data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

~ ~ ~

Walkable suburbs are some of America’s best places to live; they provide a model for renewal for their sprawling, spread-out siblings. Relatively dense commercial districts, with shops, restaurants, and movie theaters, as well as a wide variety of housing types, have always been a feature of the older suburbs that grew up along the streetcar lines of big metro areas. A 2007 study by suburban redevelopment expert Christopher Leinberger found more than 150 walkable places in America’s 30 largest metro regions–places like Hoboken, Montclair, Maplewood, and Princeton in New Jersey; Stamford and Greenwich, Connecticut; Brookline, Massachusetts; Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania; and Royal Oak and Birmingham, Michigan, outside Detroit. Newer versions of walkable suburbs can be found in regions that developed later, like Palo Alto in the heart of Silicon Valley; Santa Monica; Boulder, Colorado; Coral Gables, Florida; Decatur outside Atlanta; and Clayton near St. Louis.

These are the places where Americans are clamoring to live, where housing prices have held up even in the face of one of the greatest real estate collapses in modern memory, as Leinberger documents in his book, The Option of Urbanism. The desire for walkability can be measured in dollars and cents. Houses in walkable neighborhoods command higher prices than houses in more distant, less dense locations. A recent study by urbanist Joe Cortright for CEOs for Cities analyzed the sales of 90,000 homes in 15 major metros. In 12 out of 15 of them, walkability commanded a premium—sometimes of hundreds of thousands of dollars in places like the D.C. suburbs.

With help from my colleague Charlotta Mellander, I examined the economic relations of walkability (as ranked in Leinberger’s research and by the walkscore index) across 40 or so other U.S. metropolitan regions. We found that metros with walkable suburbs had greater economic output, higher incomes, and higher housing prices; higher levels of human capital, higher membership in the creative class; higher levels of patented innovations and of high-tech industries and employees; not to mention higher levels of happiness.

It goes both ways. On the one hand, skilled, affluent people prefer walkable neighborhoods, especially when they have young families. Many move from denser city neighborhoods, like Georgetown or Adams Morgan or Capitol Hill, to places like Bethesda, or from Manhattan or Brooklyn to Montclair or Westport or Greenwich, because they can gain security and access to good schools without having to give up amenities they left behind in the city. Whether they move to these suburbs specifically because of their walkability, their urban virtues of mixed use and generally medium-scale density ensure that the innovation and productivity-enhancing effects of clustering continue to be available to them. Just as they did in the city, people bump into each other in coffee shops and other such Third Places; they discuss projects and make deals. This sort of thing is legendary, from Silicon Valley to Nashville’s Music Row.

If America’s oldest suburbs have been its most resilient, they are not its most typical. Many of the inner-ring suburbs that boomed after World War II started out with more modest endowments of human and physical capital; some of them have since lapsed into significant disrepair. But as the metro areas continued to expand, many of these places have seen their land values rebound because they’re closer in. Ferndale, Michigan, just outside of Detroit, has gone far to revitalize itself by promoting its art scene, building affordable housing, and by marketing itself as gay friendly. Arlington, Virginia, has added density by building mixed-use high-rise complexes at its 11 Metrorail stations while encouraging the development of independent businesses in its older neighborhoods. It is a place of exhilarating contrasts, with funky coffee shops, vintage clothing stores, and places to hear indie bands close upon gleaming office towers and chain restaurants. Bellevue, Washington, just across from Seattle which has been retrofitting  and adding density and mixed-land use to its downtown for some time, recently launched a major core-building initiative, the “Bel-Red Area Transformation,” a 900-acre urban infill project that will bring mixed-use development, light rail, new streets, parks, and open spaces to a disused stretch of highway.

But not all of America’s suburbs have the option of developing compact cores along streetcar lines or transit; not all are filled with old, wonderful housing stock that is ripe for gentrification, not all of them are filled with the kinds of mega-talented techies and visionaries who are flocking to Silicon Valley. Many are sprawling, relatively characterless places, with spread out  populations living in cookie-cutter houses on large lots, who commute long distances to work. These suburbs have to rebuild from the bottom up.

In Phoenix, Arizona, three abandoned strip malls, clustered at the corner of 40th and Campbell Streets, have been converted into a restaurant, an upscale grocery, a chic bakery, and a cocktail bar. It’s called Le Grande Orange and it has become a huge attraction, both for customers and local home buyers, who want to live within walking distance of it.

National Harbor, a mix of hotels, residential units, marinas, parks, stores, and indoor and outdoor entertainment venues, is being built on the footings of two previous failed projects in Prince George’s County, Maryland. When completed, it will extend along a mile and a quarter of the Potomac.

Two professors of urban design and architecture, Ellen Dunham-Jones of Georgia Tech and June Williamson of City College of New York, have literally written the book on the challenges and opportunities that our failing suburbs present—Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs. Documenting strategies of redevelopment, re-inhabitation, and re-greening, they focus on what to do with superannuated or abandoned malls and suburban office and industrial parks.

As Americans take their business to larger and larger “mega-malls,” the smaller, older ones are left to languish. A 2001 PricewaterhouseCoopers study found that one in five malls were dead or dying – 7 percent were effectively dead and another 12 percent were vulnerable and likely to fail in the near future. But these troubled malls have become the sites of a wave of renewal. Outside of St. Paul, the parking lot that surrounded a dead shopping center built on land fill was turned back into wetlands—which in turn attracted new “lakefront” townhome development. In Lakewood, a suburb of Denver, Colorado, a dead mall on a single 103-acre superblock is being transformed into Belmar—22 urban blocks with parks, bus lines, restaurants, stores, and 1,300 new households—the downtown that Lakewood never had. Eight of the 13 regional malls in the Denver area are now planning or have completed makeovers.

But perhaps the biggest retrofit of all is happening in Tysons Corner, Virginia, the virtual archetype of an auto-dependent, sprawling edge city. Located near the junctions of three major highways, it boasts 25 million square feet of office space and four million square feet of retail space (including one of the largest malls on the East Coast). Though only 18,500 people live there, its population swells to 120,000 every day. Decades ago, developers hailed it as the wave of the future—one of hundreds of new stretched out, auto-dependent satellite centers that would render our old downtown commercial centers obsolete.  But for all the jobs it supports, stores it houses, and tax revenue it generates, Tysons Corner has been losing out of late. Its perpetual traffic gridlock and its lack of human energy have caused homebuyers to choose other places; some of the companies that were headquartered there have even moved back into the District of Columbia.

But now a major retrofit is in motion, led by its major developers and land-owners who seek to make it more walkeable, denser with a more integrated mix of uses, and more connected to the city via transit. When the D.C. Metro announced plans to build an extension to Dulles Airport that would pass through Tysons Corner, the biggest debate was not about whether or not it was needed, but whether or not to bury it underground – an expensive proposition, but one that would free up land for even more integrated mixed-use development. On June 22, 2010, the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors adopted a comprehensive plan that would transform the town from “a sprawling suburban office park” to a “24-hour urban center where people live, work, and play.” There is a certain irony in this. America’s archetypal Edge City is seeking to reinvent itself as a place whose hallmarks will be walkability, green construction, access to public transportation, and abundant public amenities, like parks and bicycle trails—something that sounds very much like a real city. And, what’s also pretty astonishing is it has competition. Nearby edge cities in Crystal City and White Flint have proposed similar transit-based retrofits of hundreds of acres. It is something that needs to happen—and that is starting to happen—across more and more of our suburbs.

There are countless other opportunities for reclamation, all across America. Disused golf courses can be transformed into parks and nature sanctuaries; abandoned car dealerships can be landscaped and developed as new, mixed-use neighborhoods. Whole commercial corridors, as Dunham-Jones and Williamson put it, “are being retrofitted in ways that integrate rather than isolate uses and regenerate underperforming asphalt into urban neighborhoods.” Developers are decking over the parking lots at commuter rail stations and building high- and mid-rise office/commercial/residential complexes atop them; they are cutting streets through formerly walled-off corporate campuses and adding restaurants, stores, and public spaces. While the recession has slowed down most of the suburban renewal projects, it’s provided further impetus for community service and regreening efforts. Abandoned big-box stores are being made over into senior centers and schools and libraries—amenities that are just as essential for neighborhoods as eateries and boutiques. Most of these retrofits, of course, are a far cry from the organic authenticity of “real cities,” Dunham-Jones and Williamson note, but they build community and lay the groundwork for still further redevelopment. Writ large and multiplied across hundreds of other metros, they are remaking the way Americans live and laying the groundwork for future economic prosperity. This type of strip commercial redevelopment will be the major development feature of the next generation.

~ ~ ~

The drive to renew our far-flung suburbs may seem like a tall order for a recession-weary nation, but it’s a lot less farfetched than someone in 1950 saying that those old decrepit urban warehouse and factory districts would turn into some of America’s most vibrant and expensive neighborhoods someday. Not to mention that remaking the suburbs, where so many Americans live, is far, far more important to our overall economic recovery and broader quality of life.

Historically, America’s economic growth has hinged on its ability to create new development patterns, new economic landscapes that simultaneously expand space and intensify our use of it. Our rebound after the panic and long depression of 1873 was forged by our transition from an agricultural economy to an urban-industrial one organized around great cities and their early streetcar suburbs. Our recovery from the Great Depression saw the rise of massive metropolitan complexes of cities and suburbs. The drive to remake our suburbs today, to turn them into more vibrant, livable, people-friendly communities—and, most important, to create the strategically located pockets of density required for innovation and productivity growth—may provide our own troubled era with the fix that it so desperately needs.

Here’s an update of our Top 25 Cities for College Graduates which ran earlier this week at The Daily Beast. Since my MPI team did the analysis for all 350-plus U.S. metros, we decided to break out the rankings by metro size. Below you’ll find the top 25 rankings for metros in three size groups – large metros (1 million and above), medium-size metros (between 250,000 and 1 million people), and small metros (those with under 250,000 people).

As we’ve said before, this is a data-driven analysis and small shifts in the weighting can make a significant difference in the final rankings. So treat these rankings as a broad guide to interesting places and try not get too bogged down by the specific ranks.

And do have a look at our Place-Finder tool to help find the place that’s best for you. Enjoy!

Large Metros (over 1 million people)

1. Austin-Round Rock, TX

2. Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV

3. Boston-Cambridge-Quincy, MA-NH

4. New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island, NY-NJ-PA

5. San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA

6. San Diego-Carlsbad-San Marcos, CA

7. Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana, CA

8. San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA

9. Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA

10. Baltimore-Towson, MD

11. Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX

12. Columbus, OH

13. Rochester, NY

14. Raleigh-Cary, NC

15. Denver-Aurora, CO

16. Milwaukee-Waukesha-West Allis, WI

17. Sacramento-Arden-Arcade-Roseville, CA

18. Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD

19. Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington, MN-WI

20. Houston-Sugar Land-Baytown, TX

21. Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Marietta, GA

22. Portland-Vancouver-Beaverton, OR-WA

23. Chicago-Naperville-Joliet, IL-IN-WI

24. New Orleans-Metairie-Kenner, LA

25. Bridgeport-Stamford-Norwalk, CT

Medium-Size Metros (250,000 to 1 million people)

1. Madison, WI

2. Ann Arbor, MI

3. Durham, NC

4. Boulder, CO

5. Lincoln, NE

6. Tallahassee, FL

7. Trenton-Ewing, NJ

8. Santa Barbara-Santa Maria, CA

9. Albany-Schenectady-Troy, NY

10. Santa Cruz-Watsonville, CA

11. Fort Collins-Loveland, CO

12. Honolulu, HI

13. Lexington-Fayette, KY

14. Eugene-Springfield, OR

15. Anchorage, AK

16. Lansing-East Lansing, MI

17. Santa Rosa-Petaluma, CA

18. San Luis Obispo-Paso Robles, CA

19. Tucson, AZ

20. Poughkeepsie-Newburgh-Middletown, NY

21. Oxnard-Thousand Oaks-Ventura, CA

22. Fresno, CA

23. Baton Rouge, LA

24. Jackson, MS

25. Albuquerque, NM

Small Metros (fewer than 250,000 people)

1. Ithaca, NY

2. Iowa City, IA

3. Charlottesville, VA

4. College Station-Bryan, TX

5. Lawrence, KS

6. Columbia, MO

7. State College, PA

8. Olympia, WA

9. Bloomington, IN

10. Missoula, MT

10. Athens-Clarke County, GA

12. Champaign-Urbana, IL

13. Fargo, ND-MN

14. Bloomington-Normal, IL

15. Waco, TX

16. Lafayette, IN

17. Bellingham, WA

18. Kingston, NY

19. Blacksburg-Christiansburg-Radford, VA

20. Flagstaff, AZ

21. Santa Fe, NM

22. Logan, UT-ID

23. Chico, CA

24. Harrisonburg, VA

25. Auburn-Opelika, AL

The core measures used to develop the ranking are:

• Presence of 20-somethings (20-24-year-olds) in the population.
• Singles – measured as the share of unmarried people.
• Earnings potential – measured as average salary.
• Unemployment rate.
• College-educated workforce – the share of the workforce with a bachelor’s degree or higher.
• Rental housing – Having an abundant, available stock of rental housing is key. We measured this as the share of all housing made up of rental units.
• Youth-oriented amenities – like bars, restaurants, cafes, sports facilities, and entertainment venues.
• Creative capital – we use this to capture the creative energy of a place. It’s measured as the share of employed artists, musicians, actors, dancers, writers, designers, and entertainers in the workforce.
• Openness – a region’s openness to new and different kinds of people reflects a lack of barriers and willingness to let newcomers, including young people, have a go. Our measure is the share of gays and lesbians and foreign-born residents in a community.

For more on the methodology behind the analysis, visit the full article at The Daily Beast.

It appears that families, not just the young and skilled, have been moving away from Rustbelt cities like Cleveland, according to this story in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, based on a new report from the Brookings Institution.

“White flight” described the rush of white families to the suburbs in the 1960s and 1970s. By the 1980s, observers talked of “middle-class flight” to reflect black residents who had joined the tide.  A new pattern may demand a new label. Research shows that an exodus of moms and dads of all races and income levels — family flight — is reshaping Cleveland and its region.  Cleveland lost nearly 10 percent of its people this decade and married couples with children led the stampede, a study released today reveals. An emptying city, meanwhile, drew few of the immigrant families replenishing communities elsewhere, resulting in swift decline.

The great folks at GOOD magazine interviewed me for their neighborhoods issue.  Here it is.

Now this is pretty cool.  The great graphic above is from the folks at LegoClick.

The Wall Street Journal asked six experts to come up with lists of the “next youth magnet cities.” I was one of them. The top spot was a tie – D.C. and Seattle, followed by NYC, Portland (OR), Austin, San Jose, Denver, Raleigh-Durham, Dallas, Chicago, and Boston. You can see the list and read the full story here.

Below is what I sent to the Journal.

My Rankings
These are based on my own rankings of the best places for young, professional singles, aged 20-29 in Who’s Your City?, as well as other rankings and surveys and my reading of current trends. The data are from Kevin Stolarick, additional analysis by Charlotta Mellander, and research assistance by Patrick Adler, my colleagues at the Martin Prosperity Institute.

1) New York City
The country’s largest city was the top destination for recent graduates according to the career-cast survey noted below. The city’s size affords migrants an economic diversity that simply cannot exist in smaller places. It’s the place to be if you’re in finance, fashion, entertainment, publishing, or even indie music. Also unparalleled is the city’s mythic status, as a place to test one’s mettle against the best and the brightest. One of the top five on my own rankings of the best places for young, single, 20-29-year-olds.

2) Washington, D.C
The public sector is ascendant and, in the eyes of many, Barack Obama is America’s coolest boss. These factors will only bolster Washington, D.C., a city that is already a hotbed of young talent. 45.9 percent of Washington, D.C.’s workforce has a bachelor’s degree or more, and young people enjoy positions of influence on congressional staffs and at think tanks. And it is a center for media, journalism, and blogging as well as high-tech. D.C. is the top city in my own rankings of best places for young singles aged 20-29. If I was 23 or 24 again, it’s where I’d head.

3) San Francisco/ Silicon Valley
Still the world’s high-tech hot spot. One of the top five on my own rankings. Great quality of life, a large stock of smart, driven young people, and fantastic restaurants and outdoor activities.

4) Chicago
If management or industry is your thing, Chicago is the place to be. It’s the talent magnet for the midwest and beyond, drawing driven young people by the droves. It has great amenities, great nightlife, a spectacular waterfront, great restaurants, and it’s affordable.

5) Boulder/ Denver
Yes, it’s smaller than the others, but it packs a real punch. Boulder ranked No. 1 among all U.S. destinations on my own rankings of the best places for young singles 20-29. Now add in Denver and it has the size and scale to be a great place for young professionals. It has thriving, high-tech industries about the best outdoor recreation – from skiing to cycling – to be had anywhere.

6) L.A.
If you want a career in film, entertainment, fashion, or music, it’s the place to be. Sure, it’s crowded, pricey, and the traffic is horrible, but it has abundant sunshine, great temperatures, unbelievable beaches, and fantastic restaurants.

7) Boston
It’s always been a great “stay-over” town for the thousands of regional college grads. This year, it surpassed NYC as the No. 1 destination for Harvard grads. It’s the world center for management consulting with strong finance and high-tech industries. Not to mention a great place to stick around, work for awhile, and go back to grad school.

Seattle
A high-tech and lifestyle mecca in its own right with Amazon, Microsoft, and more. It’s also a center for cutting-edge retail with Starbucks, Costco, and REI. Quality of place by the boatloads.

9) Austin
What can you say about a place whose motto is “Keep Austin Weird”? It remains a high-tech player, with great quality of life that’s affordable. It’s the indie music capital of the universe with SXSW and Austin City Limits and a great array of local venues. Plus, with residents like Lance Armstrong, it’s a cyclist and outdoor enthusiast’s paradise.

10) Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill
Another great high-tech, university, smart city, which boasts a mild climate, highly educated population, great outdoor activities, and a great music scene.

Runners-Up/Honorable Mention:

• Madison, Wisconsin, and Ann Arbor, Michigan – Both great stay-over college towns that rank very high on my own rankings. College towns in general perform well in this demographic; they’ve coped reasonably well with the recession and are good places to stay or head, at least for a while
• Atlanta and Minneapolis: Regional talent magnets for the southeast and Great Lakes/Plains respectively.
• Outside the U.S.: London, Toronto, Shanghai, Sydney-Melbourne-Brisbane.

Key factors affecting location of young, college-educated singles
Even with signs that the worst of the Great Recession is over, young people are understandably worried about their economic future. This past May, the Wall Street Journal reported that some of the past decade’s “youth magnet” locations are losing their appeal as economic opportunities whither in cities like Phoenix, Seattle, Atlanta, Charlotte, Dallas, Las Vegas, and others which led the nation in attracting young college grads from 2005 to 2007. So where are young, educated, single people heading?

A recent survey lists the best places for college grads to launch their careers. New York City topped the list – despite the financial crisis – with eight in 10 survey respondents listing it as one of their top destinations. Second-place Washington, D.C. was named by 63 percent. Los Angeles, Boston, San Francisco, Chicago, Denver, Seattle, and San Diego round out the top 10. And, remember, this is a list of the places that are best to find a job, not to have fun, go to great restaurants or clubs, make friends, or get lots of dates.

The list is heavy on big cities, and it’s remarkably similar to a comprehensive list my research team and I developed for my book Who’s Your City? of the best places for college-educated 20- to 29-year-olds. It also put big cities such as San Francisco, Washington, Boston, Los Angeles, and New York on top. (D.C. jumped to the top of the list when we factored affordability and cost into the mix.) College towns also did well, with Madison, WI, topping the list for medium-size regions, and Boulder, CO, taking first place for small regions. Raleigh, N.C.; Ann Arbor, MI; and New Haven, CT also score well. To get at the factors that attract and keep Gen Y in certain places, my colleague Charlotta Mellander and I analyzed the results of a Gallup survey of some 28,000 Americans.

First off, young, educated people are considerably less attached to where they live and considerably more mobile than other Americans. About a quarter (26.5 percent) of them said they were extremely satisfied with the place they currently live, compared with nearly half (47.4 percent) of all Americans. Twenty-somethings are, on average, three or four times more likely to move than 40- or 50-somethings.

Jobs are clearly important. Gen Y members ranked the availability of jobs second when asked what would keep them in their current location and fourth in terms of their overall satisfaction with their community. But it’s more than just a job. Young people today are faced with dwindling corporate commitment; job tenure has grown far shorter and people switch jobs with much greater frequency. That means picking a location which not only offers a great job but a thick labor market with abundant career opportunity, as a hedge against economic uncertainty and the risk of layoff.

But the highest-ranked factor is the ability to meet people and make friends. Young, educated people intuitively understand what economic sociologists have documented: Vibrant social networks are key to landing jobs, moving forward in your career, and one’s broader personal happiness. They not only desire a thick labor market but what I have come to call a thick mating market where they can meet new people, go out on dates, and eventually find a life partner. What do you think is more important to happiness: Finding a great job or finding the right life partner?

Where older Americans see high-quality schools and safe streets as key, Gen Y understandably ranks the availability of outstanding colleges and universities higher. Many are likely to go back to graduate school and having great programs nearby is a big plus. When it comes to their overall community satisfaction, access to open space, being in an aesthetically beautiful city, and having access to vibrant nightlife are also quite important. Affordable housing, air, and water quality, and availability of religious institutions matter too but slightly less so.

My own assessment is that finding the right place to live is among the three most important decisions of your life. Moving is an expensive and time-consuming proposition; mistakes can be costly to fix or undo.

Do you feel that you live in the right city? Or is there a move in your future?

From left to right: Richard Florida; Mayor of Albany, New York, Gerald D. Jennings; Jeff Stone, president of Key Bank, NA, Capital Region New York District; City Champion Catherine M. Hedgeman; President, Center for Economic Growth, Michael Tucker

On the What’s Happening section of the blog on RyanSeacrest.com, Richard Florida’s singles map from Who’s Your City? is front and center. Ryan Tweeted about it as well.

What do you consider the best city for singles?