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Demographics have a strong impact on housing choices, but some markets have higher concentrations of certain age groups than others.

Trulia's Alexandra Lee looks at the company's analysis of where the oldest and youngest groups of people live. Looking at the top 100 metros, here are a couple highlights from the data:

  • Counties with large shares of elderly people are concentrated in the Sun Belt, in a northern strip from the interior Pacific Northwest to northern Michigan, and up through Appalachia and the Alleghenies to northern New England in the East. By contrast, Utah is stands out as the nation’s youngest state.
  • The counties with the highest proportion of working-age people are in metros where one industry reigns supreme. Arlington and Alexandria, Va., both near government-dominated Washington, D.C., are the top two counties with populations skewed toward working age. Respectively, 70.5% and 69.7% of residents are between 20 and 64. Tech powerhouse San Francisco County, which consists entirely of the city of San Francisco, comes in third, with 69.7% of residents of working age. Compare these with the national working-age average of 59.2%. These counties experience high housing demand from people in their wage-earning prime and, not surprisingly, have home values well above the national median: $672,700 in Arlington and a whopping $1,359,000 in San Francisco, compared with $217,300 nationally.
  • San Francisco is also the county with the lowest share of kids in the nation: just 15.0% of the population is 19 or younger compared with the national average of 25.2%. Other kid-scarce counties are either quite old, like Sarasota County, Fla., or are expensive areas with large working populations, like New York County, NY, the borough of Manhattan.
  • The counties that skew oldest in the nation—Sarasota County, Fla., Mathews County, Va., and Flagler County, Fla.—are all coastal areas with balmy weather. About one in three people in these places are over 65: 36.1% in Sarasota, 30.8% in Mathews, and 30.1% in Flagler. Retirees can also get some beachy bargains here—home values are near the national median, at $252,400 in Sarasota and $219,300 in Flagler.
  • Tooele County, Utah has the largest proportion of youngsters in the nation at 35.9%. Utah is the state with the highest birth rate in the nation, and, in Tooele, it’s showing.
  • Some counties have experienced an outsized age shift in the past seven years. Compared with their 2010 age makeup, Hudspeth County, Tex., Teller County, Colo., and Park County, Colo. have seen the biggest net swings in age proportions. All three have gained share of elderly and lost share of young people.
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