Love is like a lot of different things.
Pat Benatar may have famously compared love to a battlefield and Plato to a serious mental disease, but we happen think it's more like gambling ("always know the odds") or real estate ("location, location, location").
The good people over at San Francisco-based real estate listing site Trulia have run the numbers and taken a look at which Bay Area neighborhoods are the most heavily skewed toward one gender. In other words, they've figured out where to pick up your next date with as little competition as possible.
The site found that the Marina had the highest ratio of women-to-men and the Tenderloin was the most heavily weighted in the other direction. So, if you're a guy looking to pick up all the single ladies, the Marina is likely your best bet.
On the other hand, while the Tenderloin does have a lot of single guys, they might not be the city's most desirable bachelors. The area boasts both the city's highest concentration of single room occupancy hotels and homeless shelters--many of which are male single-sex residencies. Not to say that aren't potential love connections to be found in the Tenderloin, just to take Trulia's recommendation with a grain of salt.
Ladies looking for abundant supplies of eligible guys might want to go farther south to the San Jose area, where men outnumber women by over 25 percent in a cluster of neighborhoods. San Jose had the fifth highest ratio of men-to-women of any city in the country--a fact that lends some empirical data to the nickname "Man Jose."
Conversely, across the Golden Gate Bridge in southern Marin County, there are far more women than men. So, if anyone was wondering why there are no girls in San Francisco, they might want to look to the north.
Overall, the areas on the city's eastern half were home to more men, whereas San Francisco's west side was dominated by females. This pattern followed an overall nationwide trend picked up in the study--men had a tendency to cluster near cities' downtown cores as opposed to the more residential regions where women tend to live.
To come up with their numbers, Trulia subtracted LGBT singles and senior citizens out of the equation and only counted single people living alone. In a blog post, Trulia Chief Economist Jed Kolko explained the reasoning behind the decision to exclude those with roommates or living with their parents:
We know from our consumer survey about love and housing that not all singles are equally in demand, at least when it comes to dating. Among unmarried adults, 62% prefer to date someone who lives alone; only 14% prefer to date someone who lives with other people. Perhaps living alone sends the right signal about independence and availability--or perhaps living alone just makes dating easier (does anyone really want to hear their mom ask, "Honey, can I make you and your friend some pancakes?").
Last year, in honor of Gay Pride month, Trulia did a post looking at the neighborhoods with the highest concentration of same-sex male couples and, unsurprisingly, placed San Francisco's Castro District atop the list; however, nearby Noe Valley ranked pretty high as well.
For same-sex female couples, the Castro barely scraped the top ten with tiny Sonoma County hamlet of Guerneville and the Oakland's Redwood Heights/Skyline neighborhood finishing a few places higher.