How San Francisco Is Forcing Its Gay Population Onto The Streets
Very interesting article. It's been common knowledge that property in San Fran has become outrageously expensive but I didn't realize how this transformation and the law is affecting the LGBT community.
Think Progress
How San Francisco Is Forcing Its Gay Population Onto The Streets
by Sacha Feinman Posted on October 20, 2014
...San Francisco occupies a sacrosanct place in the LGBTQ community the world over. Long before its current association as the global capital of tech and startups, this was a place where the LGBTQ community could gather and live an open and accepted life. For many people like Olivia, this promise is allure enough to justify living on the streets, which is borne out by the ugly statistics. Every two years, the San Francisco Human Services Agency releases a biennial homeless count. In 2013, the agency solicited information on sexual orientation for the first time, discovering in the process that 29 percent of the city’s roughly 6,436 homeless residents identify as LGBTQ. The number is nearly twice the national average, and its publication set off a predictable round of hand wringing and head scratching. How is it that the city of Harvey Milk could fail an already at-risk population?
On the face of it, the high number of homeless LGBTQ makes a sort of intuitive sense. As a shining light of sensitivity and acceptance, the city is bound to attract those escaping prejudice in their places of origin. This was certainly the case with Olivia, whom I met at Larkin Street Youth Services, a local non-profit that offers housing, counseling and job training for homeless youth under the age of 25. Stories like hers are sadly commonplace, characterized by young people travelling to this city as strangers devoid of safety nets or social networks, stepping off the bus only to find themselves in the U.S. city with the highest median rent. Fueled by a remarkable tech boom characterized by multi-billion dollar valuations and average salaries in the six figures, even the cheapest parts of San Francisco are very expensive.
Though it’s an often repeated narrative, this story does not fully explain the 29 percent rate. “LGBTQ homelessness actually has as much to do with evictions as it does people arriving with no plan,” offers Jennifer Friedenbach, Executive Director of the Coalition on Homelessness. “You really aren’t going to see elderly members of the LGBTQ community that are asset broke suddenly coming to San Francisco. The problem, in terms of the differential [with the national average], has much more to do with displacement.” Unlike Olivia, who arrived in this city homeless, many of the LGBTQ people living on the streets were forced to leave their homes, and for one reason or another chose to live on the streets rather than seek shelter in a more affordable community.
Bevan Dufty, a former city supervisor and Mayor Ed Lee’s current appointment as the Director of Housing Opportunity, Partnerships and Engagement (HOPE) has identified displacement in the data he’s seen. “When you look at the numbers from the homeless count and the 29 percent, it’s steady and represented by young people 18 – 24, by adults, and by seniors. In many cities, you do see numbers this high for the youth population, but you don’t really see it for adults and seniors. That’s what makes this unique.”....
MORE at http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2014/10/20/3581941/san-francisco-lgbt-homeless/