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.

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.

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.”

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 CNBC noted 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 Chronicle reported. Most of the Bay Area is not as affected as other parts of the state, though insurance premiums are rising for home insurance.

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.”

(Editor’s note: This article was originally published by the Bay Area Reporter and is part of a national initiative exploring how geography, policy, and local conditions influence access to opportunity. Find more stories at economicopportunitylab.com .)

Economic mobility usually assumes a starting line: a bedroom to return to, a parent to call, a place to regroup after things go wrong. For many LGBTQ young adults in South Florida, that starting line never existed. 

That’s why Our Fund Foundation, SunServe, and Sunshine Cathedral partnered to build Sunshine Pride House, a 12-bed transitional home helping LGBTQ young adults stabilize, find work, and prepare for independence.

For the residents who live there, that support shows up in small, ordinary ways.

In the evenings, the house settles into a rhythm: dinner prep, shared chores, quiet conversations at the kitchen counter. As house mother, Martha Acevedo anchors the day-to-day life of Sunshine Pride House, creating a sense of consistency many residents have never known. A few nights a week, she cooks home-prepared meals, often inviting residents to join her in the kitchen — chopping, stirring, learning by doing.

For some, the meal itself is the moment that lands hardest.

“Some of them tell me they haven’t had a cooked meal in such a long time,” Acevedo said. “When I serve the food and they say ‘thank you,’ you can see it. They’re kids. They just needed a home.”

Acevedo says the reactions still catch her off guard. What feels routine to her — cooking, setting plates, sitting down together — can feel extraordinary to young people who have spent months or years without a consistent place to eat.

“When I cook, I do it proudly,” she said. “I give a lot of love.”

According to research from The Trevor Project, 28% of LGBTQ youth have experienced homelessness or housing instability at some point in their lives. Data from True Colors United underscores the scale of the disparity — LGBTQ youth are 2.2 times more likely to experience homelessness than non-LGBTQ youth.

“So these kids are coming to the house because they’ve either aged out of foster care or they’ve been kicked out of their homes because they’re LGBTQ,” said Tony Lima, CEO of SunServe. “You kind of have to start from zero. That’s the common theme of all of these youth.”

Those experiences carry lasting consequences: LGBTQ youth who have been unhoused report significantly higher rates of depression, anxiety, and other mental health challenges than their housed peers. 

“In order to have proper mental health, that’s conducive to living a full life, you need to have a home,” Lima said. “You need to have a place to be able to rest your head.”

That reality isn’t unique to LGBTQ youth, though queer young people are far more likely to experience it — and far less likely to have family support to fall back on.

Elijah Manley’s experience with homelessness began during the 2008 financial crisis, when he was about 9 years old. After his single mother lost her job, his family was evicted and spent years cycling through instability — living in their car, rotating between friends’ homes, staying in an overcrowded apartment with relatives, and at one point sleeping in a storage unit in Lauderhill. Each morning, Manley and his siblings woke before dawn to shower at beach facilities before heading to school, trying to maintain a sense of normalcy without a permanent home.

Manley, who is now 27, was not yet out as queer during this period, and his homelessness was driven by economic collapse rather than family rejection. Still, he says the experience shows how early housing instability — regardless of cause — can derail childhood, education, and long-term opportunity. His family’s situation improved only gradually, and he credits a mix of early work, community connections, and “a little luck” for eventually finding stability — a path he notes many others never get.

Today, Manley points to LGBTQ nonprofits like SunServe as essential lifelines — especially for young people who face both economic instability and identity-based rejection.

“They’re very vital and lifesaving. Without them, a lot of people would be in a much worse situation,” he said. “They keep our communities housed and fed and connected to the social services and healthcare they need. They’re filling a void the government hasn’t filled.”

Manley, who has run for public office several times and is currently running for Congress to represent Florida’s 20th district in West Broward, argues that relying on private charity to fill that void leaves too many people behind.

“These are services the government should be providing or supporting,” he said. “Charity should not be public policy. It should be provided to everybody, regardless of their income, and not dependent on somebody else’s charity.”

Housing is Just The Starting Point

For now, Sunshine Pride House exists largely because private donors stepped in where public dollars did not. While public agencies can and do fund programs that reach LGBTQ people, government funding is often constrained by nondiscrimination and open-access requirements that make it difficult to support services explicitly limited to a single identity group. 

The home is owned by Sunshine Cathedral, while SunServe runs the day-to-day programming and services inside. With no state or federal grants tied to the house itself, its roughly $250,000 annual operating budget is raised through individual donors and philanthropic partners, coordinated in large part through Our Fund Foundation. 

“There’s no way to do this work without being clear about the population we’re serving — and that cuts off a lot of funding possibilities,” said David Jobin, CEO of Our Fund.  

The funding covers housing, staffing, life coaching, and wraparound support — allowing the program to exist in a policy environment where targeting services to LGBTQ youth often disqualifies programs from public dollars altogether.

The idea for Sunshine Pride House began not as a programmatic expansion, but as a personal intervention. More than five years ago, philanthropist Michael Kalb approached Our Fund Foundation with a simple question: what would it take to create a safe, stable home for LGBTQ young people who had nowhere else to go? 

Kalb had been deeply affected after witnessing unhoused youth being mocked in public spaces, and he believed housing could change the entire trajectory of a young person’s life. Working closely with Jobin, that initial conversation grew into a multi-year effort to design a model tailored specifically to South Florida’s LGBTQ youth.

“People hear ‘housing’ and think that’s the solution, but housing is just the starting point,” Jobin said. 

Kalb ultimately invested more than $600,000 into the project, joined by fellow donor Terry Merlin, while Our Fund helped assemble the partnerships needed to make it work. Sunshine Cathedral agreed to purchase and own the property, drawing on its decades of experience managing community housing, while SunServe took on day-to-day operations and services inside the home. What opened first as a pilot in a rented house evolved into the current 12-bed facility — now fully owned, privately funded, and operating as one of the only LGBTQ-specific transitional housing programs in the region. 

“If we want to continue to bring these services to life, that requires funding — and we’re really going to need help to do that,” said John Marler, Communications Director of SunServe. “Government funding has been harder and harder to come by, and foundation funding and corporate sponsorships are becoming more competitive.”

Kalb, who died unexpectedly in December, often said a safe place allows young people to “finally exhale,” and Sunshine Pride House stands as a direct reflection of that belief.

The structure of Sunshine Pride House reflects that focus on stability first, mobility second. The home is designed as short-term transitional housing rather than a permanent shelter. 

They Have Nowhere Elsewhere to Go 

For Mario DePedro, who helps oversee the program, the work often means stepping into roles most parents fill by default.

“We have youth who are just leaving home for the first time and their parents don’t support them. They have nowhere else to go. Now it’s up to us to take the place of what the parent should be,” he said.

Inside the house, residents share bedrooms and follow a structured daily routine. They are required to work or attend school, participate in therapy, and meet regularly with life coaches who help them set goals.

“We call it a future plan. We’re helping them with the goals they want to reach, so they can be successful in their life,” he said.

That plan can include finishing high school, enrolling in college, securing steady employment, learning financial literacy, or preparing for independent housing.

Many residents arrive carrying layers of trauma that extend far beyond the moment they lost housing.

“They’re coming from a lot of trauma,” DePedro said. “Being kicked out at 18 usually isn’t the first trauma — there’s often a cycle of abuse that leads up to that moment.” 

For residents who began adulthood without savings, family support, or stable housing, that planning process can be the difference between cycling back into crisis and building a path toward long-term economic stability.

“They need jobs. They need mental health care. And they need community — they want to feel like they’re not alone in it,” he said.

The needs are immediate and interconnected. That’s why the house is built around flexibility rather than rigid benchmarks.

“This is absolutely not one-size-fits-all. Everything we do is client-centered and client-led,” DePedro said. “The reality is that we’re saving kids’ lives in this house. These are people who have nowhere else to go.”

Because of safety concerns, the location of Sunshine Pride House is not publicly disclosed, and residents are not identified.

“We’re really putting young people on a path for success that they might not otherwise achieve in their life without this lift,” said Jobin. “You hear the words ‘Pride House’ and you think it’s just a roof. But it’s the wraparound services that put young people on trajectories for successful lives.”

Instead of starting a new nonprofit, Jobin said the foundation focused on partnering with organizations already doing the work — bringing together SunServe, Sunshine Cathedral, and others to build a model that could move quickly and last.

Sunshine Pride House doesn’t promise transformation or guarantee success. What it offers is something far more basic — time, safety, and a place to rest their head. For young people who started adulthood with nothing, that pause can be enough to change what comes next.

(Editor’s note: 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.)

The Human Rights Campaign Foundation (HRC Foundation), the public education, research, and policy arm of the Human Rights Campaign, the largest LGBTQ+ advocacy group in the United States, has released new data showing that there are more LGBTQ+ identifying people than ever before, just as the Trump administration continues efforts to minimize LGBTQ+ rights and visibility.

The data, released late last week, includes a multitude of updated population estimates for LGBTQ+ identifying people in the United States. It shows that a record-high 12% of U.S. adults — roughly 25.6 million people — identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or gender diverse.

The numbers were drawn from more than 2.4 million responses to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey collected between 2021 and 2024. The Household Pulse Survey is one of the last major federal data sources to include a gender identity measure before the Trump administration removed sexual orientation and gender identity questions from roughly 360 federal data collections.

HRC President Kelley Robinson spoke about the data, emphasizing that it shows not only that the LGBTQ+ community is bigger than the Trump administration would have Americans believe, but that LGBTQ+ Americans continue to be targeted for no reason other than being different.

“LGBTQ+ Americans are everywhere. There are 25 million of us across the country, and we now have critical mass in almost every state in the nation,” Robinson said in a statement. “We’re not a niche constituency, and no campaign, brand, or employer can afford to treat us like one.”

The survey also collected other important information about LGBTQ+ Americans.

40: The number of states with an LGBTQ+ population greater than 10%, plus the District of Columbia. This includes electoral battleground states such as Arizona (13.34%), Georgia (11.46%), Michigan (10.95%), New Hampshire (11.88%), North Carolina (10.56%), Ohio (11.29%), Pennsylvania (11.14%), and Texas (12.54%).

25.6 million: Number of U.S. adults who identify as LGBTQ+.

12% : Percentage of the adult population who identify as LGBTQ+.

More than half of all LGBTQ+ adults (53.8%) are between 18 and 34 — a signal of sustained, long-term growth in political and economic power as this generation ages into peak spending and voting years.

Other recent studies show that nearly 30% of the adult Gen Z population identifies as LGBTQ+.

The data also shows growing diversity across the community. Hispanic adults make up a larger share of the LGBTQ+ population (18%) than of non-LGBTQ+ adults (13%). Black adults make up a smaller share, about 9%, compared to 12%, reinforcing that LGBTQ+ identity cuts across every racial and ethnic community.

Bisexual+ people are the largest group, at over 7% of all U.S. adults.

Tari Hanneman, HRC Foundation’s senior director of research and education, spoke about how the White House’s recent decision to remove LGBTQ-specific data questions from federal surveys undermines the purpose of federal data collection: to collect data that accurately reflects the U.S. population, regardless of political ideology.

“Reliable data are essential for understanding who lives in this country and what our communities need to thrive,” Hanneman said. “Removing sexual orientation and gender identity questions from surveys like the one used for this analysis introduces significant gaps in this understanding. These findings show that LGBTQ+ people are a substantial and growing segment of the population, underscoring the need for our continued inclusion in data collection efforts.”

The data also included key demographics about the age of LGBTQ+ people, showing that younger Americans are increasingly more likely to identify as LGBTQ+, while overall, all age groups saw an increase in people self-identifying as LGBTQ+ in the data.

More than half of LGBTQ+ adults (approximately 54%) are younger than 35, compared with about 22% of non-LGBTQ+ adults. Adults ages 25–34 constitute roughly one-third of the LGBTQ+ adult population.

The data also shows a similar generational pattern within age groups. Nearly 32% of adults ages 18–24 and 22% of adults ages 25–34 identify as LGBTQ+, compared with approximately 12% of adults ages 35–44 and less than 8% of each older age group.

The data also included statistics on the education levels of LGBTQ+ Americans, indicating that they are more likely to have some college education or an associate degree than their non-LGBTQ+ peers.

LGBTQ+ adults are more likely (34.57%) to have an associate degree or some college experience and less likely to have only a high school education or less, or a graduate degree.

According to a report from the Williams Institute, a research organization dedicated to collecting and explaining data on LGBTQ+ people and related policy, during the first year of the second Trump administration, approximately 360 federal data collections removed at least one sexual orientation or gender identity measure, including 338 that removed gender identity measures and at least 60 that removed sexual orientation measures.

The Williams Institute, along with HRC, asserts that these changes diminish the federal government’s capacity to measure LGBTQ+ populations and understand their experiences and needs — something that should be detrimental to federal data collection and assessment, regardless of what political ideology one subscribes to.

In 2024, the Census Bureau conducted a large-scale test of questions on sexual orientation and gender identity for possible inclusion in the American Community Survey, the nation’s primary source of detailed demographic data. The test involved nearly half a million households, but the Bureau has not released the promised reports and datasets showing how those questions performed. In September 2025 Democracy Forward filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit seeking their release, alleging that the Census Bureau had unlawfully withheld the records.

The HRC Foundation also provided information about the methodology used to produce its estimates. The data uses weighted surveys conducted through its Community Insights research program. Community Insights is an opt-in research panel rather than a probability sample of the U.S. population; demographic benchmarks are used to adjust survey data so that respondents more closely reflect the broader LGBTQ+ adult population.

The HRC Foundation selected the Household Pulse Survey due to its large sample size, national probability-based design, detailed demographic data, separate measures for sexual orientation and gender identity, and availability of public-use survey weights.

The analysis includes 37 rounds of the U.S. Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey conducted between 2021 and 2024, yielding 2,452,769 responses before exclusions for missing or imputed data.

HRC’s estimate of 12.03% is based on the Census Bureau’s self-administered Household Pulse Survey, while Gallup’s most recent estimate of 9% is based on telephone interviews and a different approach to measuring LGBTQ+ identity.

HRC has suggested that self-administered surveys may offer greater privacy when people answer sensitive questions, which may contribute to differences in disclosure.

The analysis classifies respondents as lesbian or gay, bisexual+, transgender, or gender-expansive. The bisexual+ category includes respondents who selected bisexual as well as those who selected another sexual identity not represented by the available categories. The transgender or gender-expansive classification is determined using respondents’ reported sex assigned at birth and current gender identity.

The move to remove LGBTQ+ people from federal data collection is just one of many things the Trump-Vance administration has taken to minimize — if not hide — LGBTQ+ people in the country.

From the anti-transgender military executive order, which attempted to bar new recruits and remove transgender military members already serving, signed in January 2025, to attempts to prohibit gender-affirming medical care in federal health care programs and all but destroy gender-affirming care for minors, the administration has pursued a series of policies affecting LGBTQ+ Americans.

The administration has also attempted to make biological sex the only definition of gender on federal paperwork, rolled back DEI programs across the federal government, and taken other steps affecting how LGBTQ+ people are represented and recognized in federal policy and data collection.