Bc you voted a certain way and support big tech and big govt to get bigger, and now you cant afford living on that pozzed up, poop-and-needled-ridden street. It’s discrimination, of course.
Learn to code.
LGBT people must be able to afford to living in a gayborhood if its culture is to be preserved, and experts and community members say local governments can do more to help.
And even if it can’t be found in so-called gayborhoods, LGBT people still need access to safe, affordable housing.
Neighborhoods such as San Francisco’s Castro district or New York’s Greenwich Village have cultural and historical significance for the LGBT community and house a large LGBT population.
A home in the Castro district values at nearly $1.8 million, according to the housing app Zillow, while comparable homes in other neighborhoods in the city average at $1.3 million. That’s a half-million dollar difference.
“The gayer the block, the faster it rises in value,” Amin Ghaziani told USA TODAY. Ghaziani is a professor of sociology at the University of British Columbia and author of There Goes The Gayborhood?
Ghaziani researched the increased gentrification and rising cost of gayborhoods, and his findings show that areas with larger populations of same-gender households correlate to real estate values that are higher than the average.
Research by Zillow released in May echoes these findings: Most gay neighborhoods have higher home values than their surroundings, sometimes to the tune of double or triple the home value.
Evidence also suggests the neighborhoods’ gay identities are eroding.
Cleve Jones, a long-time LGBT activist in San Francisco, has said in recent years that the Castro has largely sloughed off its gay identity in favor of a largely heterosexual, “techie” population.
“In time there will be gay flags, but no gay people," he told the Financial Times.
Historically, LGBT people who have been unable to reside in well-off neighborhoods — whether due to high costs or discriminatory practices — have flocked to urban neighborhoods even as many heterosexual families began relocating to the suburbs.
LGBT people formed their own enclaves in these areas, building thriving businesses and booming communities. And soon after, families began moving back to cities.
The overall cost of living in big cities has risen drastically. But Ghaziani told USA TODAY that developers and investors looked to where LGBT people are located in metropolitan cities “as a strategy to increase their return on investment.”
As masses of straight people wanted to move back to big cities, he says that moneyed individuals looking to cash in on the urban boom “followed” the gays.
“This is an exploitive strategy, one that reduces the humanity of LGBTQ+ people to their economic potential,” he said to USA TODAY. “The spirit of equality and social justice is absent in this type of thinking.”
His findings have shown that the population of LGBT people in gayborhoods has fallen.
The rising costs of gayborhoods disproportionately affects people of color, women and trans women, said Mikhitarian.
“For people at the intersection of any of these identities, it’s even worse because the pay gap is even larger,” she said.
