Salt Lake ranking slips as place for singles

Salt Lake City has plummeted to No. 36 out of 40 in a ranking of "best cities for singles." Lower than Cleveland even.

This year's pitiful showing represents a drop of 12 spots from Forbes.com's 2005 ranking. That's largely because of our nightlife, explains Lacey Rose, who co-authored the singles ranking. It turns out, though, that Salt Lake City's reputation may have been besmirched in part due to a change in the way Forbes compiled the statistics.

In past years, the online magazine came up with its "nightlife" score by simply adding up the number of restaurants, bars and nightclubs in each city. This year, Forbes figured the nightlife on a per capita basis.

"There's a flaw in the methodology," says Pam Perlich, a senior research economist at the University of Utah. It's silly to figure nightlife on a per capita basis, she says, since per capita in this case includes preschoolers as well as adults. In the Salt Lake metropolitan area, nearly one-third of the population is under 18, compared to one-fourth in the Denver-Boulder area, which ranked No. 1 on Forbes.com's singles-o-meter.

Children have "night lights, not nightlife," says Perlich.

Perlich points to the perils of statistics, recalling a newspaper story from a few years back that named Utah's Daggett County (current population 833) as the place with the most single men per capita in the entire country. Daggett, she later pointed out to the reporter, is the home of a correctional facility, so "it's a great place for a single woman if she wants her companion to be an incarcerated male."

According to Forbes.com, whose annual singles ranking is now in its sixth year, scoring was based on seven criteria: singles, nightlife, culture, cost of living alone, job growth, online dating and coolness. The "online dating" score was based on "active profiles per capita," a number that was also skewed because of our plethora of kids.

The magazine gave double weight to the criterion "singles" (the percentage of a city's over-15 population that has never been married). This score also helped pull Salt Lake City down into the cellar of singledom, because of course we like to marry and to marry young (in Utah we have the highest percentage of married households in the nation, and our median age at first marriage is three years younger than in the country at large).