9 Gayborhoods With Median Home Values Under $300,000

Back when people were declaring the death of American cities, LGBTQ+ residents in search of affordable housing gravitated to urban areas, and eventually created gayborhoods - cultural enclaves of community and belonging. Forty years later, some of those gayborhoods are among the most sought-after neighborhoods in the country.

That cycle of urban gentrification, which began in the 1970s, continues today as people are drawn to amenities in gayborhoods and their proximity to urban job centers. While that translates into a home value premium in most gayborhoods[1], some offer a steep discount.

Take the South Arena District/Southeast Denver Heights section of San Antonio, where 4% of households are headed by same-sex couples. A typical home there costs 36.9% less than the city at large ($111,500 versus $176,800).

The premiums carried by most gayborhoods ironically puts those areas out of reach for many LGBTQ+ people, especially women and people who are transgender and gender nonconforming. Those groups, on average, have lower incomes than cisgender gay men.

Among the priciest gayborhoods is West Palm Springs, Calif., where 9% of all homes are headed by same-sex couples. A typical home there costs about $1.2 million - $860,300 more than a typical home in the Riverside metro area, which costs $369,200. That amounts to a 233% surcharge, and it’s not even the highest. Zillow ran a full analysis of price premiums in gayborhoods around the country.

Rather than feature gayborhoods with home values below the surrounding city - which includes downtown San Jose, Calif., where the typical home costs 38.1% less than the surrounding city, but is still $553,900 - instead, we’re highlighting nine gayborhoods nationwide where homes are valued under $300,000:

 

Housing Market (by city unless specified)	Gayborhood	% Same-Sex Couples	Gayborhood Home Value	Market Home Value	Gayborhood Premium
San Antonio	South Arena District/Southeast Denver Heights	4.0%	$111,500	$176,800	-36.9%
Milwaukee	Honey Creek Manor	2.3%	$146,200	$123,200	18.7%
Las Vegas	East Paradise	4.9%	$217,510	$276,500	-21.3%
Cleveland	Riverside	3.1%	$221,000	$56,100	293.9%
Virginia Beach Metro	Lafayette-Winona, Norfolk VA	2.7%	$224,200	$230,200	-2.6%
Tampa-St. Petersburg Metro	Southeast Gulfport (small city outside of St. Petersburg)	7.6%	$236,700	$214,300	10.5%
St. Louis	Shaw – South Grand	3.8%	$238,126	$119,500	99.3%
Kansas City	Longfellow	5.7%	$251,300	$394,735	-36.3%
Chicago	Edgewater to Lakeview	3.7%	$299,506	$230,400	30.0%

 

Methodology

• To produce the table of gayborhoods, this research mapped concentrations of same-sex couple households and Zillow Home Value Index by census tract. The percentage of same-sex couples in each tract were gathered from the American Community Survey 2013-2017 dataset made accessible by IPUMS.org. Census tracts and groupings with the highest percentages of same-sex couple households were matched to the neighborhood that best contained them. Tracts with a very small number of households were not included in the analysis.
• The concentration of couples in more affordable neighborhoods with fewer gay bars and amenities illustrate a possible shortcoming of Census's same-sex couple data: It is likely to overrepresent older LGBTQ households who are more likely to be displaced to more affordable areas and out of amenity-rich spaces.[2]
• The lack of a question in the American Community Survey on sexual orientation and gender identity means that single LGBTQ people cannot be identified. As many of the above metros show, this can lead to gayborhoods that are likely to have high concentrations of LGBTQ singles being invisible on the map-often moving gayborhoods to more affordable and suburban parts of major metros.

[1] High percentages of same-sex couple households are unlikely to cause high home price premiums. Instead, because they are often located in or near urban cores, their proximity to work centers and amenities is likely to be more associated with the premiums.

[2] Using same-sex couple households, which is the measurement made available by the U.S. Census Bureau, is a workaround to the absense of a question about sexual orientation and gender identity. Same-sex couple households omit singles and generally skew towards older LGBTQ populations.

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