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November 24, 2008

Look at all the lonely people -- where do they all come from?

Mostly Manhattan it seems. The astounding fact of the day is that more Manhattan residences have only one occupant:

Until I was 37 years old, I lived alone. It never struck me as particularly odd. If you’ve been in New York for any length of time, you know from both intuition and daily observation that many people live on their own in this town. But I never fully appreciated how many—and by extension, how colossally banal my own solitary arrangement was—until I checked with the Department of City Planning a couple of months ago. 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.

Alone Together
Of course, that isn't to say that half of Manhattan residents live alone. Since on average households with more than one resident have more than 2 residents within them, less than a third of Manhattan's residents live alone.

Posted by OneEyedMan at November 24, 2008 7:20 PM

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