Living alone in Manchester, NH
Friday, March 19, 2010 at 2:33PM Come May, it will be five years since the missus and I got hitched on the island of Santorini, Greece:
And it appears we haven't been the only Manchester, NH, residents settling down in recent years. According to the U.S. Census Bureau's annual American Fact Finder program, the percentage of Manchester, NH, householders living alone decreased from 35.2 in 2006 to 30.5 in 2008, the most recent year for which data are available.
Of the 43,461 households in Manchester, NH, in 2008, approximately 13,256 of them - one in three - were occupied by only one person. When I first heard this statistic yesterday, it stuck me, for some reason, as abnormally high. Perhaps it's because I'm married and mainly socialize with folks who are also married or in serious relationships.
Still, I know that in the wake of the foreclosure crisis and as a result of the overall down economy, there have been many friends and families doubling and tripling up in the same household. Maybe that's what's caused the city's percentage of single householders to decrease over the past three years? But no. According to the same Census Bureau data, the percentage of Manchester, NH, households occupied by people who are not related has remained just about the same, while the percentage of households occupied by relatives has actually decreased by 2 percent.
Curious, I compared the city's single householder statistic to that of other area cities and, as it turns out, these cities boast comparible numbers to us. Nashua, NH, and Lowell, MA, for example, saw 29.5 percent of their households containing a single adult in 2008. Lawrence, MA, was only slightly lower at 24.8 percent.
Curious, indeed.
Reader Comments (1)
Wow, she's way out of your league.
Uh, I mean, good post. Very interesting stuff about single households, or something.