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Are you a young, single, and university-educated professional in Toledo who goes to the gym and enjoys outdoor activities but is having trouble finding a quality date?
According to a recent survey by Men’s Health magazine, the problem is not you — it’s Toledo.
Toledo ranked third from last in the magazine’s recent survey of the 101 “top” U.S. cities to find a mate, edging out last-place Buffalo. The survey was based mostly on statistics such as divorce rates, education levels, and gender ratios and focused in particular on the mating outlook for college-educated individuals.
In the education category, Toledo ranked 95th.
It may seem easy to shrug off the Men’s Health rankings as a perhaps embarrassing but harmless product of amateurish demography. After all, why should most residents care about how many phone numbers Toledo’s laptop-toting 26-year-olds are getting when they loosen their ties on Saturday nights?
Yet the larger demographic trends behind the survey suggest that the shallow depth of Toledo’s dating pool for educated professionals, who are the lifeblood of a global knowledge economy, may have far-reaching economic consequences for the area’s overall economy. With few industry-leading businesses remaining in Toledo, a stagnant dating scene is one more reason for the highly mobile group of skilled and educated professionals to leave town.
In this decade’s most influential public policy and planning book, The Rise of the Creative Class, author Richard Florida, a professor at George Mason University, argued that the cities that prosper in today’s post-industrial, knowledge-intensive economy are those that can attract the most educated and skilled employees. These creative workers are lured more by a city’s cultural and lifestyle attractions than traditional incentives such as low taxes.
Notably, the top-ranked city in the Men’s Health survey for finding a mate, San Francisco, came out as the top U.S. city where creative people live, according to Mr. Florida’s compilations. The professor also noted how cities with a large number of outdoor recreation opportunities and physically active residents — criteria that Men’s Health considered for its mate survey — tend to attract the most “creative class” workers.So the reasons Toledo’s educated singles are having trouble finding dates can have serious repercussions for northwest Ohio’s economy and job market. But unlike a glitzy night on the town, the story is not intended to be fun or glamorous and could in fact be uncomfortable to read for those who prefer to focus on Toledo’s positives rather than its problems.
Many, especially those who are married and settled, may be more comfortable continuing to think of Toledo the way it used to be — before its population and Fortune 500 decline — and not see the city as it is viewed by young and single urban profes-sionals who are coveted today by cities across the country.
Moving elsewhere
Rishi Sehgal no longer lives in Toledo but says he likes visiting.
The 27-year-old followed a path of education from Maumee Valley Country Day School to Emory University in Atlanta and then to law school at American University’s Washington college of law. He lives in New York City, where he works as a corporate real estate attorney.
Yet as much as Mr. Sehgal says he enjoyed growing up in Toledo, he just can’t imagine living here now.
To begin with, Toledo cannot compete with New York City as a place to do corporate real estate business. Secondly, leaving the bright lights of Manhattan would be a massive blow to his social life and dating prospects.
Mr. Sehgal said one of the greatest social benefits to living in New York City is being surrounded by other young, ambitious professionals like himself who are working near the top of their industry fields. He doesn’t believe he would find a similar culture in Toledo.
“There’s no way I would live there in my 20s,” Mr. Sehgal said. “Toledo is an industrial city; it’s not a professional capital.”
Toledo native Paula Pennypacker, 48, left the city in 1998 with her husband, Duane Abbajay, a fellow Toledoan. They now live in Scottsdale, Ariz., and in a recent telephone interview recalled how fortunate she was to have found someone as intelligent as Mr. Abbajay in her hometown.
“Since intelligence is my number one requisite in a mate, if I was 25 and living in Toledo now, that would have been a reason to leave,” Ms. Pennypacker said.A University of Toledo graduate and former Owens-Illinois Inc. employee, Ms. Pennypacker established herself as an activist in the Lucas County Republican Party and twice ran unsuccessfully for mayor in the early 1990s. She met Mr. Abbajay through one of her volunteers for her first mayoral campaign and said that they left Toledo together to “start over in a more Republican-friendly area.” Today, they both operate the mail-order beauty-supply company that Ms. Pennypacker founded, Just For Redheads.
Ms. Pennypacker still keeps abreast of what’s happening in Toledo and said she is concerned the city’s vibrancy will decline further if more educated Toledoans move out.
“It’s not that we don’t have bright people in Toledo,” she said. “It’s just that they leave.”
‘Brain drain’
Toledo officials regularly cite “brain drain” as a leading challenge facing the city and region. Indeed, U.S. Census Bureau figures show that Toledo was losing twice as many college-educated residents as it was gaining by 2000. Between that year and 2005, the number of men and women 25 years or older with at least a bachelor’s degree dropped by 1,363, to 21,131.
Nationwide, college-educated men and women of that age demographic made up 27 percent of the population in 2005 and 23 percent of Ohioans, according to census data. Yet in Toledo, just 17 percent of the population 25 and over had four-year college degrees.
A large educated work force is a boon for employers, as well as for a city’s economy. The census bureau recently reported that adults with a bachelor’s degree are paid an average of $51,206 a year, while those with only a high school diploma make $27,915.
Besides their higher paychecks, college-educated individuals are the skilled labor that high-tech firms throughout the country want to attract. And in Ohio, where manufacturing jobs are disappearing, high-tech fields are eyed as a key part of the solution to job loss.
To retain and attract bright minds to the city, Toledo politicians have proposed a host of strategies in recent years that have included artists-in-residence programs, marketing campaigns, and special committees.
But they have yet to get to the heart of the matter — love.Limited options
“The people I would like to date aren’t here anymore. They all moved elsewhere,” said Eric Wagner, 31, who holds a bachelor’s degree, is studying for a master’s degree at the University of Toledo, and works as a zoning administrator for Monclova Township.
Mr. Wagner, who grew up and still lives in West Toledo, said he would like to find a woman in the city with similar interests who is also a young professional. While a UT undergraduate, he said he found plenty of women whom he was interested in dating. But since graduation, each one of these young women — along with most of his college friends — have left the city, he said.
“If you’re not married after your mid-20s here, you start feeling like you’re a minority of sorts,” Mr. Wagner said. “I’m not nervous about it. But obviously, I’m getting older every year and it’s something I think about.”
At 44, Carolyn Matthews has had some time to gather thoughts on Toledo’s dating scene. Her conclusion is that many community and church events here tend to be oriented toward younger singles, so for someone like herself in her 40s, never married, and leery of hanging out in bars or on Internet dating sites, it’s a tough place to be.
The average age of first marriage in Ohio was 26 for men and 25 for women in 2005. Nationwide it was 27 for men and also 25 for women.
“For people my age, there’s nothing to do in this city,” said Ms. Matthews, a Toledo native and UT graduate, who also lived several years in Columbus and the Washington area.
Ms. Matthews works as director of development for Little Sisters of the Poor in Oregon. She said that, ideally, she would like to find and settle down with a fellow professional and college graduate but would not make it a requirement. She considers herself a devout Christian and said that finding someone with similar beliefs and values is more important.
Despite her lackluster success with mate hunting, Ms. Matthews said she loves Toledo and is not looking to leave town. She is just glad to have a group of friends here her age who are also single.An education deficit
For other Toledo singles, their troubles with finding quality dates have left them increasingly cynical.
Take one handsome, athletic, and college-educated 31-year-old who works for a Toledo bank in sales and marketing. He returned to Toledo from a large city out West about two years ago to be closer to family. He asked that his name not be printed out of concerns of offending his business clients.
He said it is easy for him to meet women in Toledo for shorter-term flings, but finding women here whom he is truly interested in is another story. The problem with Toledo, he said, is that so few of the women here that he finds physically attractive are intelligent or college educated.
Between him and most of the girls he has met, the banker said, “the education difference is huge.”
“I know what I want,” he said. “Intellectual conversation is intriguing — it’s fulfilling. Anytime you can communicate with someone on your level, you want to be with them more and more.”
There are reasons to believe that rankings and lifestyle reports such as those done by Men’s Health magazine can influence the decisions of young professionals to move here or leave.
In a survey last year of more than 1,000 college-educated individuals ages 25 to 34, two-thirds of them said that when considering a move, they decide first where they want to live and then look for a job within that geographic area. Women in particular said that they initially choose geography over job considerations.
The survey was conducted by CEOs for Cities, a nonprofit alliance of U.S. mayors, corporate executives, university presidents, and nonprofit leaders. It also asked individuals their “top influencers” for deciding where to move, and found that weekend visits and discussions with friends or family already living in the area were the greatest influences. Moreover, nearly half gave high marks to what they found from reading magazine articles and “best places to live” lists.
Carol Coletta, president and chief executive officer of CEOs for Cities, said cities such as Toledo that are facing a deficit of college-educated people should consider developing strategies for making themselves a more desirable place for this demographic to live. Solutions can include forming networking groups for professionals, establishing gathering spots, and creating dense neighborhood settings, she said.For cities, keeping their population of single professionals happy can be crucial to retaining this class of workers. Because of their high education levels, these professionals have more economic freedom to relocate and find new jobs in cities that they feel offer a higher quality of life. Those without university degrees or advanced skill sets often do not have such flexibility.
“Once you have the deficit, it’s really hard to correct it,” Ms. Coletta said of cities’ attempts to retain educated professionals. “You can’t just hope and pray that it will go away on its own because it won’t.”
Toledo’s best hope in increasing the number of college-educated singles may lie in persuading the sons and daughters who left to attend nationally ranked universities to return to their hometown, despite the inherent sacrifices to their social lives and dating prospects.
A tough selling job
Of course, some people will be harder to convince than others.
One former resident, a 30-year-old high school teacher who is now in Columbus, said she left Toledo and northwest Ohio shortly after graduating from Bowling Green State University because she sought a more cosmopolitan social atmosphere and felt Columbus was a better place for single, educated women like herself to find similarly educated men to date.
The woman requested her name be withheld from this article to avoid offending family members still living in Toledo.
“If I wanted to get married, I know that my choices would be extremely limited living in Toledo,” she said.
She said that in Columbus, there are more art galleries, music venues, film festivals, and other activities for singles and young people.
“In Toledo, there is nothing to do but get drunk or go out to eat,” she said. “Everyone says, ‘Go to the art museum,’ but you can only go to the art museum so many times.”
Her sentiments also run counter to a perception that many young professionals who leave Toledo eventually will come back once they have married and are ready to rear children.
She said she is not planning to return, largely because of what she described as a cultural pressure in Toledo to conform to a socially conservative mindset.
“The tolerance for progressive thought and personal difference is low,” she said.
“Eventually I will want to have a family, and I would like my children to have a different experience,” she explained. “I would like them to be exposed to diversity and culture.”‘The 3 Ts’
In The Rise of the Creative Class, Mr. Florida noted how creative-class workers seek to live in and move to cities with an underlying culture of tolerance and open-mindedness toward new ideas and diversity. These cities also tend to have significant communities of artists, musicians, and gay people.
To prosper in the new knowledge-driven economy, Mr. Florida argues that cities must master the “3 Ts” of economic development: technology, talent, and tolerance.
For Bert Russ, 34, who grew up in South Toledo and now works as a civil-rights attorney in Washington, his decision nine years ago to move into Washington’s diverse Dupont Circle neighborhood was based on lifestyle factors.
“As a gay man, I wanted to move to a bigger city that I thought would be more tolerant and gay-friendly than Toledo,” Mr. Russ said. “[Dupont Circle] is a very safe community where you can walk around and hold hands, and it’s no big deal.”
Although Mr. Russ said he did not consider Toledo to be a markedly intolerant place when he lived here, “the gay community seemed kind of invisible.”
In Washington Mr. Russ met his partner, Thomas Sharp, a Yale law school graduate, and in 2004 they married in Ontario, where same-sex couples can legally marry.
Even though their marriage is not recognized in Washington, Mr. Russ said he considers the city to be more tolerant than anywhere in Ohio, where voters passed an amendment in 2004 banning same-sex marriage and barring state agencies from providing benefits to domestic partners.
The ban passed despite concerns from some corporations and universities that it could harm the state’s image and undermine the ability to attract skilled labor.
“It was like a big ‘not welcome here’ sign,” Mr. Russ said of the amendment.
‘The singles left town’
Along with its shrinking number of college graduates, Toledo’s population as a whole is contracting. Census figures released last summer showed Toledo as the 13th-fastest shrinking city in the country, with the bureau estimating the 2005 population at 285,937, a nearly 9 percent drop from the 2000 count.
Between 1970 and 2000, the city’s population fell from 383,818 to 313,619 — an 18 percent drop. If that trend continues, Toledo would lose another 57,000 people by 2030, with its population shrinking to about 250,000.
But the loss could be even greater. The city lost more than 27,000 people just between 2000 to 2005, according to census estimates.
Besides people, Toledo shed some of its biggest corporations, accelerating the loss of highly educated managers, engineers, and other professionals who made for a more diverse social scene in the past.
Jack Harris, founder of Glass City Singles, said he is well aware that the number of Toledo singles has been shrinking.
Glass City Singles sponsors parties and social functions for area singles ages 35 and over. When the company sent mailings in the mid-1990s to 5,000 area singles in its database, usually about 500 of the flyers were returned by the post office as being undeliverable, meaning that the individual had likely moved, Mr. Harris said. By 2000, the number of flyers returned had grown to more than 1,000.
Because of dwindling interest, Mr. Harris said his company now puts on just one singles dance a week rather than the three it did a decade ago.
“The singles left town,” he said.
Different perspectives
To be sure, not every single, educated, and rising professional in Toledo is frustrated with the dating scene. Regina Yaskey, 24, a second-year medical student at the University of Toledo medical school, the former Medical College of Ohio, said she just has no time for dating while staying on top of her more than seven hours of course work a day.
“My nose is always in a book,” she said.
Ms. Yaskey, who grew up in the Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights, is not sure whether she will stay in Toledo or relocate after graduation. Yet when she reaches the point in which she is ready to date again, she said she probably will be looking for a man with at least a college degree.
“They have to be educated and they have to have goals,” she said.
Her view is typical of educated women, studies show, who traditionally have rarely chosen a mate from a lower social-economic strata. Men, however, will marry below their education and class level and have been found to place higher importance than women on a mate’s physical appearance.
Blue-collar reputation
The reputation of being a blue-collar community that’s a good place to raise a family is hurting Toledo’s ability to move forward, says Ms. Pennypacker, the former politically active resident.
“I think if Toledo didn’t have such a blue-collar reputation, that could stop the brain drain,” she said. “But you mention that when you’re running for office, and you’re run out of town.”
Tony Adlington, who is 31 years old and 6 feet, 8 inches tall, was easy to spot in the crowd of green shirts at last month’s St. Patrick’s Day party at the Erie Street Market. He works as a union pipefitter, a job that he said did not require formal education beyond high school.
Although presently unattached, the Point Place native said he is generally happy with Toledo’s dating scene and in the past decade or so has been in nearly 10 relationships that lasted six months or more.
“There are some cities that are better, but it’s not bad,” Mr. Adlington said. “There are a lot of good girls here.”
But a sea of blue-collar men in Toledo may be making it difficult for career women to find mates. Statistically, it is becoming harder for single college-educated women to find men with similar credentials.
In a marked change from earlier decades, women have been receiving more bachelor’s degrees than men since the early 1990s, and accounted for 58 percent of total college enrollment in 2004, according to the American Council on Education.
Another recent CEOs for Cities report, “The Young and the Restless in a Knowledge Economy,” notes how women continue to play an increasing role in an area’s economic success and urges cities to work to accommodate and retain them.
However, studies have found that when educated single women live among a smaller pool of educated men, such as in Toledo, men without college degrees are often reluctant to get involved with better-educated women. And when the women earn higher salaries than the men do, it can compound matters.
Although this phenomenon is said to be fading for women in large cosmopolitan cities such as Manhattan, some say it still exists in Toledo.
Jessica Agocs, 24, is a Lourdes College graduate who is working toward a master’s degree in library science at Wayne State University in Detroit. On a recent Friday night, she shared theories on why she and her good friend and classmate, Cristin O’Brien, 23, have had trouble finding quality men to date in Toledo.
Although Miss Agocs said she holds few reservations about dating men in working-class professions because of her family’s background, she is concerned that some blue-collar men are hesitant to get involved with women like her.
“There are a lot a blue-collar jobs around here, and a lot of men might be intimidated by women who are college graduates,” Miss Agocs said.
An EPIC effort
Efforts are under way in Toledo to improve the quality of life for the area’s young professionals.
The city of Toledo this year formed a six-person Best and Brightest Committee with a mission “to facilitate the growth, relocation, and retention of young professionals in the city of Toledo,” said Sara Hoffman, a committee member who is also director of the city’s youth commission.
Ms. Hoffman said she and other committee members are careful not to use the term “brain drain” in regards to Toledo because “it’s almost an insult to the ones who are here.”
In February, a new networking group for professionals ages 20 to 40 — EPIC Toledo: Engaging People, Inspiring Change — held a kickoff party at the Erie Street Market that attracted close to 800 people, the majority in their 20s and 30s.
The group is sponsored by the Toledo Regional Chamber of Commerce and has a goal of getting young professionals more involved in the city community in the hope they will settle here permanently.
Stephen Vasquez, 25, who is single, said he was recently introduced to other young Toledo professionals like himself through EPIC’s meetings and social functions.
What made it tough finding these people before on his own, Mr. Vasquez said, is that although Toledo has lots of bars and restaurants, there are few central areas where professionals socialize.
“Yeah, you can go to a bar, but how can you pick out a young professional there?” asked Mr. Vasquez, a South Toledo native and graduate of St. Francis de Sales High School and Ohio University. He works downtown as a development officer for the United Way.
“When you’re a young professional, you start wondering, ‘Where are the other professionals who are my age?’” he said.
By JC REINDL
BLADE STAFF WRITER
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