This article originally appeared in Bay Area Reporter.
LGBTQ people have a variety of housing options when they’re lucky enough to be able to afford property. In San Francisco – long considered a safe haven for the queer community – individual needs have to be weighed both against the city’s chronic housing shortage and a competitive but often lucrative job market.
After a lull of several years, the city’s real estate market has heated up in recent months, driven by the city’s economic recovery post-COVID lockdowns and the artificial intelligence boom.
For Rick Page, 68, and Anthony Farace, 57, both gay men, the job market was a top reason to move back to the city after they’d left the Bay Area five years ago.
Page said the couple had left behind a “huge home in a town called Oakhurst, on the way to Yosemite.” When moving back to San Francisco they wanted to balance suburban and downtown vibes, Farace said, leading them to settle in Diamond Heights, a tiny neighborhood built atop three hills above Noe Valley, that has suburban sensibilities but isn’t too far from downtown.
“In the summer it’s a little foggy but it’s nicer up here the rest of the time, and where it felt like you aren’t downtown where it’s just concrete and buildings,” Farace said.
Added Page, “It sounds goofy, but if there’s a tsunami, it won’t get all the way up here.”
Page said that in the spring the couple initially bought a relatively small studio in Diamond Heights. But they found that it didn’t meet their needs and purchased a second studio unit nearby that did. They closed on the larger condo unit in October.
“It just didn’t have any kind of patio or outdoor thing for the dog,” Page said of their first studio, “so we saw something upgraded with a kitchen redone, nice hardwood floors, a fireplace, a sunny patio, so it was much nicer. We bought that one, now we have to figure out what to do with the first one.”
The first unit was $450,000 and the second $520,000, they stated.
The couple also mentioned a lack of some of the downtown, South of Market, and Mission District street disorder that garnered negative headlines in the past several years. The couple also noted that Diamond Heights is more affordable than traditionally high-priced Russian Hill, which is closer to downtown.
Nevertheless, “The employment, the social life is better” in San Francisco, Page added.
Federal data shows many LGBTQ people want to own a home.
Fannie Mae, the government sponsored enterprise that buys home loans, does have some LGBT data, according to research from 2023 that was published in 2024. The data is the result of sexual orientation and gender identity identifiers in the National Housing Survey. It did not ask about queer representation. https://www.fanniemae.com/research-and-insights/fannie-mae-now-collects-first-its-kind-lgbt-data-through-national-housing-survey
According to the report, 8.6% of respondents identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender – similar to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey. The survey included responses from a weighted total of 12,363 people 18 years and older, with a weighted total of 1,059 identifying as LGBT.
The research found the LGBT homeownership rate to be 46%, which is much lower than the overall U.S. homeownership rate of 65%.
The latest available data from The Urban Institute reveals that the homeownership rate for individuals identifying as LGBTQ+ stands at 51%, in contrast to 71% for those who identify as both straight and cisgender. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, at least 1.3 million same-sex couples reside in the U.S., meaning a significant number of LGBTQ people in this country do not own their own homes.
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Close to the Castro
In San Francisco, the Diamond Heights neighborhood is just a half-hour walk from the Castro, and even shorter on the bus.
Charlie Mader is a gay man who has been a Realtor in San Francisco for “just under 25 years,” with a particular emphasis on Diamond Heights, the Castro, and Noe Valley. He said that while many LGBTQ people want to live relatively close to a queer neighborhood, such as the Castro, “It’s not like it used to be.”
Even in spite of a recent backlash to LGBTQ equality in the mid-2020s, leading to a number of federal policies largely targeting transgender and gender-nonconforming people, Mader said that since marriage equality, “You hear ‘There’s no need for us to live together in a gay ghetto,’ and we’re interspersed throughout the community and the country.”
Marriage equality became legal in California in June 2013, two years before the U.S. Supreme Court made same-sex unions legal nationwide in 2015.
Mader said marriage equality helped incentivize more LGBTQ home-buying due to an old Clinton administration tax law that gave married couples favorable tax incentives versus single homebuyers.
But even within the City-by-the-Bay, the distinction between neighborhoods is not as stark.
“I hear the Mission is just as gay as the Castro is, and the food is better,” Mader said. “I can’t argue with that.”
Angel Carney, a lesbian Realtor, has also been in the Castro area for decades. She said the threshold of home ownership there has risen dramatically.
“When I first started,” which was in 2002, she said, “I had teachers, I had nurses, I had a doctor … It was diverse in terms of who was buying. Everybody had a way to get into the market.”
Now, “with tech, they blew out everybody,” she added, saying first-time homebuyers are sometimes competing with tech employees making six-figure salaries from their early 20s due to their economic opportunities.
Carney said that even so, “It’s mostly a two-income household who’s buying in the Castro,” largely people in their 30s.
“LGBTQ is more of a rarity,” she added. “I’ve seen more non-LGBTQ, I would say, couples buying in the Castro.”
One reason is because while it is such an iconic epicenter of the LGBTQ community, it is “definitely a transit hub, and it’s geographically central, so if you work on the Peninsula, you go over Diamond Street and you’re on [Highway] 280. You can get to BART, to the airport, it definitely is transit centric for work, for traveling, if you’re a tech worker.”
Understanding that unhoused people are often part of San Francisco neighborhoods such as the Castro is also a factor, Mader said.
“Because gays are so tolerant, it draws a magnet for people who you know are distressed and so you see more antisocial behavior, begging on the street, people just getting high because they know they can get away with it,” he said. That can impact people’s desire to buy a forever home in one neighborhood or another.
Indeed, the Castro has experienced fewer open-air drug scenes than other parts of the city, such as Sixth Street or the Civic Center Plaza, which are both near the downtown core. Such activity has, however, remained a persistent complaint of Castro merchants. In early December, Sophie Marie, a legislative aide to gay Board of Supervisors President Rafael Mandelman, who represents the neighborhood as District 8 supervisor, noted that “a lot” of unhoused people have recently moved into the Castro as they leave South of Market and Civic Center amid an increase in law enforcement activity and attention from city government there.
The Castro is among those neighborhoods seeing building height limits increased as a result of Mayor Daniel Lurie’s family zoning plan that, after much rancor, passed the Board of Supervisors for the final time on December 9. The plan is intended to increase the city’s housing stock to meet state housing goals.
San Francisco’s median home sale price rose nearly 6% to $1.85 million, its highest amount since 2022, earlier this year, as the San Francisco Standard reported.
Mader said that nonetheless, “There are empty condos everywhere for sale,” and that market is down 20% from its peak.
“Right now I’m selling for $625,000 – I’ve sold for $100,000 more than that,” Mader noted.
Carney agreed that condos are very available right now.
“If you’re thinking about entering the market, think about condos,” she advised. “When interest rates go down, prices will go up, so get in now on a condo. People say they’re waiting for the market to drop – well, the market dropped on condos. Those are a great buy right now.”
National trends
The Fannie Mae data showed that homeownership aspirations are high among LGBT consumers, with 83% saying they “would like to buy at some point” or “continue to own,” the report stated. This share is comparable to non-LGBT consumers, the report stated. LGBT consumers also believe there are more obstacles to owning a home than their non-LGBT peers.
Those obstacles include that over 70% of LGBT respondents said it was difficult to get a home mortgage today, compared to only 55% of non-LGBT respondents, according to the research. LGBT consumers were more concerned about closing costs, credit score or history, current debt, and insufficient income for monthly payments.
The Federal Reserve on December 10 lowered interest rates for the third time this year. The recent reduction was by a quarter of a percentage point, as the New York Times reported. The new range is between 3.25% to 3.75%. But CNBCnoted that mortgage rates may remain higher because they are less impacted by the Fed. The average rate for a 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage is currently about 6.35%, the network reported December 10.
Nationally, the real estate market is dealing with the same uncertainty as the rest of the economy, now almost one year into President Donald Trump’s second term.
“Everyone is afraid of another Trump recession,” Mader said. “People are not buying houses especially in places like Florida, where they’re having all kinds of issues with insurance.”
Florida is the nation’s most expensive state for home insurance due to natural disasters like hurricanes.
California is also experiencing insurance issues, particularly in areas prone to wildfires, as the San Francisco Chroniclereported. Most of the Bay Area is not as affected as other parts of the state, though insurance premiums are rising for home insurance.
Looking elsewhere
Not everyone wants to live in a big city.
Mark Kliem, who’s part of the LGBTQ Real Estate Alliance, focuses on the North Bay, encompassing Solano, Napa, and Sonoma counties.
“Consumers can contact the alliance no matter where they live and connect with the nearest LGBTQ agent close to their area whether they are buyers or sellers,” Kliem, who is gay, said.
Kliem lives in the Solano County city of Vallejo, where the real estate market took a dive during the Great Recession.
“A lot of investors swooped in and bought up as many of those places as they could, so there was a lot of investing in property through that, and a lot of flippers,” he said, referring to people who buy a property, fix it up, and then sell it for a profit.
Now, the area is one of the country’s hottest real estate markets, he said, because it’s near San Francisco, has warmer weather and is more affordable long-term.
“It’s a good place location wise – we’re on a bay, we have a ferry service to downtown San Francisco. We don’t have BART, so it’s a little problematic to get to the nearest BART, but our weather gets even warmer, less fog, than Oakland. Throughout the year, it’s a five-degree difference from San Francisco.”
Ultimately, the Golden State and the Bay Area in particular are poised to remain competitive for buyers of all sexual orientations and gender identity – despite the fact that that leads to so many barriers to entry. Gay Realtor Anthony Waite, 30, explained why.
“A lot of people who moved to Austin, Texas [during the COVID pandemic lockdowns] said there’s not a lot to do,” Waite said. “In San Francisco, you could find something to do every single corner every hour, day and night. Texas doesn’t offer that.”
This article is part of a national initiative exploring how geography, policy, and local conditions influence access to opportunity. Find more stories at economicopportunitylab.com/ .