VivaSync

Affluent and unhampered by children – or so the myth goes – LGBT city-dwellers have long been at the vanguard of transforming rundown neighbourhoods. But now gentrification is threatening even the most prominent gay villages

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Personal assistant Brenden Michaels is wondering if his days in Brooklyn are numbered. He still clings to a cheap rental flat in uber-gentrified Williamsburg, but has seen his neighbourhood’s prices skyrocket. He now laughingly suspects even the improvements he’s made to his own home may eventually come back to bite him.

“I’ve repainted everything, put plants on the fire escape and done a lot of maintenance. If I leave this apartment it will be in a far better state than when I arrived. And by that very simple step, I have almost gentrified myself out of my own building.”

In many ways, the 29-year-old’s experience is typical of a host of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender city-dwellers. Seeking both an accepting community and affordable rent, they have often flocked together in cheaper areas of inner cities, such as gay-friendly Williamsburg. Their very presence in these areas, however, has allegedly transformed them, accelerating gentrification – and in turn pricing them out.

This LGBT long march through the inner cities is not about housing alone, of course. There is often a corresponding wave among businesses. LGBT bars and clubs have been said to have had a catalytic effect in encouraging a wealthier public back to areas such as London’s Soho or New York’s East Village.

Many western cities have nonetheless been faced recently with an epidemic of LGBT business closures. In London, more than 10 have pulled down their shutters permanently since 2010. This is a phenomenon that has also struck straight pubs and clubs, of course; it’s just that, unlike gay venues, they don’t yet risk becoming an endangered species.

Not all reasons for these closures are entirely bad. LGBT people (or at least those who don’t stand out) can now drink in straight venues with less risk of harassment, while the internet means they no longer need to cluster physically to meet. Nonetheless, displacements and closures are sending a ripple of disquiet through non-straight communities. People are starting to wonder: is gentrification destined to make so-called gay villages a thing of the past?

While in Britain the waning of gay-identified neighbourhoods is largely confined to London, outside the UK it is a phenomenon that is being played out across many western cities. Americans have been debating the rapid departure of gay businesses and homes in areas in New York, Boston, Seattle and San Francisco, among many other cities. In Europe, something similar is happening in Paris’ Marais, Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg and Munich’s Glockenbachviertel. Many locals have mobilised to protect their communities’ meeting points, but amid the fightbacks and general hand-wringing there’s also a sense of confusion.

On the one hand, there’s a conviction that LGBT-friendly areas and businesses deserve protection. On the other, there’s awareness that the people who frequent them (gay men in particular) have a reputation as the shock troops of gentrification. Affluent and unhampered by children – or so the myth goes – this group is always in the incoming vanguard of gentrifying areas, pricing out long-term locals and leaving behind a trail of look-but-don’t-touch furniture shops and overpriced coffee.

So are urban gay people who are watching their institutions and neighbourhoods disappear merely reaping what they sowed? Or is the automatic association of LGBT people with gentrification flawed?

From 2002 until it closed this November, Richard Battye owned the George and Dragon, a pub in London’s Shoreditch that became the hub of east London’s LGBT bar scene. Having lived in the area since the 1990s, Battye is somewhat regretful about Shoreditch’s transformation. But he also sees the role businesses like his have played in this change: “When we were here in the 90s, we weren’t so mindful of the community that was already there, some of whom welcomed and enjoyed the new atmosphere and some of whom were just sort of bewildered as to why it was happening. That’s partly because we’re not business people as such. We were just busy enjoying ourselves, and the George and Dragon was never a huge moneymaker.

“Then the rents crept up, the affordable spaces to live in were no longer available because they’d been done up and sold on – and the night-time economy came under fire because people had invested in housing. I feel bad for the LGBT community for their places closing down, but we can’t feel like it’s outrageous this is happening when we’re ourselves a layer of that.”

Even if incoming LGBT populations have sometimes proved to be the thin end of a pretty thick wedge of gentrification, it’s important to remember that they often make their choices for different reasons than straight neighbours. Their choice of where to live is not limited by money alone. As Michaels, a transplant to New York from rural Oregon who still subsists on a below-average income, puts it: “I didn’t leave the country[side] because I wanted to, I was pushed out. As a queer person in America growing up in the country, I did not find rural areas to be safe, welcoming or financially viable – it was only in the cities where I was able to make a stable income. Even now, if I left, I’d be taking a huge blow for my community, and I’d have fewer options when it comes to partnership.”

Practical barriers have also encouraged LGBT people to seek out cheaper, less obviously desirable areas. Well into the 1980s it could still prove difficult for non-traditional households to secure a mortgage. Those with the means were thus more likely to look for housing that was cheap enough to buy outright: for example, in 1950s Soho (for gay men) and the Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, of the 1960s and 70s (for lesbians). Being less likely to have children has also given LGBT people greater flexibility to move, given that the quality of local schools is often less important. There’s far more to this clustering than mere economic pragmatism, however. LGBT people have typically congregated in big cities because communities that accept them have proved so elusive elsewhere.

The anecdotal association between LGBT people and changing inner cities has been around for a while. What’s relatively new is the starring role they have been given in discussions around urbanism and gentrification.

This dates back to the 2002 publication of Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class. Florida’s theory placed gay people at the heart of urban regeneration, part of a gentrifying vanguard along with creative and tech workers and “high bohemians”, who together helped to repopulate and refurbish previously rundown urban areas. In doing so, the model suggests these groups suck in more economic investment by creating the sort of attractive environment in which “wealth creators” like to live. If this tolerance of gay people is matched by a higher level of foreign-born residents and racial mixing, it is even more likely to attract the creative workers on which a city’s economic success depends. In other words, the more gay people your city attracts, the more tolerant it is likely to be.

As this theory has gained momentum, Florida’s point – that sexual tolerance in itself is not the sole factor, but a litmus test that measures a city’s ability to attract many diverse groups – has tended to get drowned out. This has often led to a basic assumption that LGBT residents are somehow synonymous with economic growth.

This approach might seem a little crude, but it’s not unfounded. According to sociology professor Amin Ghaziani, who researched the subject extensively while writing his book, There Goes the Gayborhood?, there is evidence from North America to back up assumptions that LGBT residents boost property prices.

“We know that areas that have large concentrations of gays and lesbians experience greater increases in housing prices compared to the US national average,” Ghaziani says. “In areas where male same-sex households comprise more that 1% of the population [a level three times the US average], we see about a 14% increase of the price. In areas with a comparable level of female same-sex households we see a 16.5% increase. This is against a national benchmark of 10%.”

Interestingly, this process isn’t necessarily started by gay men. According to sociologist Sharon Zukin, it’s lesbians who are the “canaries in the urban coal mine”. Women often form gentrification’s vanguard, after being displaced from areas that are no longer affordable on incomes relatively lower compared to men’s.

This isn’t commonly remarked on because a lesbian presence tends to be less visible. Ghaziani explains: “Lesbians come first, but there are several reasons why people are not necessarily aware of this. Lesbians tend to plug into the existing institutions of an area – coffee shops, theatres, grocery stores. When gay men arrive, however, they tend to build new institutions – new restaurants, stores, bars – and property values start to rise. Straight people arrive last, lesbians are pushed out, and the process repeats.”

This North American model might seem too blunt an instrument when applied to the more socially mixed British urban fabric. Urban areas where LGBTs both lived and played may have sprung up easily in the sprawl of American cities, but the UK’s gay villages simply don’t fit the same template. Even in its rundown phase, London’s Soho was too expensive and dominated by commercial property to attract a massive concentration of gay residents.

There’s still a pattern clearly recognisable in the UK to the process Ghaziani describes. The gentrification of east London, for example, was partly spearheaded by lesbians. In the 1980s, London’s Hackney used to be giggled at in left-leaning circles as if it were some sort of lesbian commune. When film producer Alex Thiele moved into a flat on the Dalston/Stoke Newington borders in the early 1990s, it was still seen as beyond the middle-class pale.

“When we moved the area was cheap, but it didn’t feel entirely safe. We had a crack house next door and quite a lot of street crime, and there was an ever-so-faint smell of pity in the air from some straight people when I told them where I lived. At the same time, the area was already pretty fashionable among lesbians – there were quite a few bars around and lesbians were so identified with the area that people used to make in-jokes about right-on “Stokey” dykes. A lot of straight people who wouldn’t have dreamed of moving there then would be delighted to now, of course – if they could still afford it.”

Charting the role of LBGT people in shifts like these still remains difficult because that relevant data is so limited. In the UK, there is none at all: the census doesn’t ask about sexual orientation. (Factors such as clusters of LGBT-oriented businesses or associations of course provide strong pointers.) The US census does record same-sex households, but their figures may well include many straight people who happen to cohabit with someone of the same sex. They’ve recently – and probably more reliably – started recording same-sex households with children, but using this small niche to explore LGBT housing trends as a whole is like looking at the sky through a keyhole.

There’s also a major, obvious problem with the simple identification of LGBT people with gentrification. Namely: it takes one small, heavily publicised niche – affluent, usually white LGBTs – and presents them as representative of a whole spectrum of people. In the real world, non-straight people are, as a rule, less wealthy than average.

Ghaziani notes: “Despite the myth of gay affluence, LGBT households are actually more likely to be poor. 11.9% of US same-sex households are living in poverty compared to 5.7% of opposite-sex households. The average income for same-sex families raising children is actually $15,000 less than for straight families with kids.”

In Britain, meanwhile, recent research has highlighted large underexposed sections of the LGBT population that are actually impoverished. The University of Stirling’s Peter Matthews found that Scotland’s poorest districts had a population skewed disproportionately towards LGBT residents. Some 17% of Scotland’s non-straight citizens lived in these neighbourhoods, as opposed to 13% of heterosexuals. This runs so counter to standard images of gay affluence that it took the researchers themselves by surprise.

“When we looked at the data for Scotland, we were surprised to find that a disproportionate number of non-straight people lived in Scotland’s most deprived neighbourhoods,” Matthews says. “The most deprived areas in Scotland contain mainly social housing, so this suggested that these were people whose choices were more constrained. We also found that they were slightly older than the straight population, so we think these are people who 20 to 40 years ago had quite constrained housing choices. This could be because they didn’t excel at school or didn’t do well in the job market. There’s also a very high prevalence of youth homelessness associated with non-heterosexuality as well, so it could be people who had become homeless because they had fallen out with their families.”

These are not the freewheeling, affluent LGBT people that tend to dominate media discussion of sexual minorities. While there may well be an LGBT component to every gentrifying vanguard, an automatic yoking together of the two ignores the realities of the many non-straight lives beyond the focus of media curiosity, and the tenuous hold many LGBT people have on where they live.

It may be too early to announce the LGBT neighbourhood concept entirely dead. In some cities where discrimination and marginalisation are still strong, they remain something that the LGBT community actively tries to foster. The community organisation LGBT Detroit has been trying to encourage the (unofficial) founding of a gay village in the city, as a way of providing more solidarity and support for a community that’s weaker for being geographically dispersed.

As the organisation’s director Curtis Lipscomb explains: “We had a few areas where LGBT people moved to after the second world war, but they lasted only until the last major white flight, when a large number of white gays and lesbians moved to the northern suburbs. Now we want to create an identifiable space together. We don’t believe we have the authority to tell people where to live, but we want to provide an opportunity.”

But isn’t fostering a gay-friendly neighbourhood likely to create a situation where LGBT people only end up being moved on by gentrification, even in beleaguered Detroit? Lipscomb believes not: “San Francisco and New York are transient cities where a different population arrives and departs all the time, but that is not the case in Detroit.

“There is also a significant bible belt community here. So while you might have some [straight] residents who become interested in a [gay-friendly] neighbourhood once it starts showing visual improvements, you still have people with strong negative feelings about LGBT people. This is still a socially conservative community that still believes that LGBT people should be treated differently.”

Many cities’ gay villages may be fragile entities, stepping stones for urban change that bring gentrification in their wake. In Detroit and cities like it, however, the forces that made them necessary in the first place are apparently still alive and kicking.

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