gc
02 October 2003, 01:10 PM
Chasing the Rainbow
Is a gay population an engine of urban revival? Cities are beginning to think so.
By CHRISTOPHER SWOPE
http://www.governing.com/articles/10gays.htm
It was an unusual pep rally for a conservative place like Cincinnati. Seventy-five volunteers crammed into the multi-purpose room of the First Unitarian Church to hear New York organizer Sarah Reece tell them to go out and knock on doors and collect signatures. A fiery speaker with short-cropped hair and dressed in tan overalls, Reece prepared the mostly white posse of teenagers, senior citizens and every age in between for a day of awkward chitchat. “We’re going to talk to people and use the word ’gay,’ ” she cried. “Everyone say it — gay!”
Not all of the men listening to Reece were gay, nor were all the women in the room lesbians. Probably half of the volunteers, in fact, were straight. What brought them together was anger toward a unique Cincinnati law known as Article 12. Lots of cities allow discrimination against gays and lesbians. But Cincinnati is the only place where that principle is written into the very charter. Even if elected officials there wanted to pass an anti-discrimination law, Article 12 would stop them from doing it.
So on this sunny Saturday in August, the volunteers charged out into Cincinnati’s neighborhoods to gin up support for repealing Article 12. This marked the first time gay-rights activists had gone door to door in Cincinnati. The point of it all, Reece made clear, was not just to collect enough signatures to get a repeal measure on the ballot. It was to engage Cincinnatians on their doorsteps in a frank conversation about gays and lesbians — perhaps uncomfortably frank — and to alter public opinion, one handshake at a time. “Most folks have never had someone stand on their porch and say ’gay’ before!” Reece hollered. “It will change the way they think about gay people — if they’ve ever thought about them at all!”
As in any grassroots campaign, these canvassers, whether gay or straight, were motivated by conviction. In their view, no person should be fired from a job or be denied a place to live simply for being gay. But there is another argument for repealing Article 12, and support for it is building in Cincinnati from an unlikely source: the corporate community. There is a growing sense among Cincinnati’s business leaders that the city’s reputation for hostility toward gays and lesbians is taking an economic toll on the region and its ability to attract a top-quality workforce. Article 12, they say, is symptomatic of a mindset that turns away not only talented gay workers but also legions of creative straight people who are the key to growing jobs and wealth in the global economy.
And even more surprising, much of the momentum within business ranks is coming from the Cincinnati corporation with perhaps the stodgiest historical reputation: Procter & Gamble. P&G thinks Cincinnati must become more gay-friendly if it wants to reverse its steady decline in population. Internally, the company has changed policies so that the domestic partners of gay employees get the same benefits package as the spouses of married workers. Now P&G wants Cincinnati to take the next step and repeal Article 12. According to Louise Hughes, the firm’s director of Ohio government relations, Article 12 is a significant obstacle to corporate recruiting efforts. “We recruit employees fresh out of college,” Hughes says. “They think Cincinnati is not inclusive and that it could be a reflection that we’re an intolerant community. That doesn’t appeal to Generation Y.”
FACE TO FACE
It’s too early to tell whether Cincinnatians will repeal Article 12 when they get a chance to, probably in November of next year. What is clear, however, is that the terms of debate about gays are changing, not just in Cincinnati but in cities around the country. It seems that a new relationship is forming between cities and their gay and lesbian populations. Politically, local gay activism is coming out of the closet: Campaigns such as the one in Cincinnati are counting on open, face-to-face conversations to win public support. At the same time, new research supports the argument that Procter & Gamble is making, that there is a link between gays — or at least acceptance of them — and urban economic vitality.
Since the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York launched the modern gay-rights movement, cities have been by far the major focus of gay and lesbian activism. Gays have always liked big cities for their protective anonymity, so when they began to push for legal protections it was logical for them to start there. Today, even as a national debate brews over same-sex marriage, cities are still the center of action. As of the end of last year, according to the Washington, D.C.-based Human Rights Campaign, 119 cities had passed laws prohibiting workplace discrimination based on sexual preference. Some 140 cities or local government agencies now offer domestic partner benefits for public employees. Meanwhile, Christian conservatives have launched an urban counter-offensive, winning many local-level battles to repeal these policies or trying to override them at the state or federal level.
But the most striking new development is the growing number of blue-collar cities never considered especially friendly to gays that are passing gay-rights laws anyway. They seem to be saying that if gays need cities, then cities also need gays — whatever one may think about the homosexual lifestyle itself. “Quite apart from whether you approve or disapprove of gays and what they do in the privacy of their bedroom, there’s now ample evidence that you don’t want to alienate that population,” says Terry Grundy, a professor at the University of Cincinnati’s School of Planning. “In fact, you want to attract them.”
Much of this evidence comes from the work of Gary Gates, a researcher at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C., and Richard Florida, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Gates was one of the first to study where gays and lesbians live, and has developed a statistical measure he calls the “Gay Index.” Florida, meanwhile, studies educated and highly mobile workers who are the new muscle of the U.S. economy, workers employed in information technology, health care, finance, the arts, science and other knowledge-based fields whom he calls the “creative class.” Putting their research together, Gates and Florida found that cities where lots of creative types live — places such as San Francisco, Austin and Madison, Wisconsin — also tend to have large gay populations.
PROMOTING ACCEPTANCE
What does this mean? Economic development officials around the country have been snapping up copies of Richard Florida’s book, “The Rise of the Creative Class,” in an effort to find out. Florida doesn’t argue that homosexuals are more creative than heterosexuals. And he’s not saying that gays are the secret of urban salvation. But he does make the case that in today’s knowledge economy, where younger people especially jump from job to job and move from city to city, the cultural attributes of place matter more than the old virtues of corporate loyalty.
And one of the many things the creative class looks for in a place to live, the argument goes, is tolerance, not just toward gays but toward people who have purple hair, wear nose rings or are culturally distinctive in almost any way at all. The individuals who Richard Florida studies, more often than not, are in fact straight, don’t die their hair odd colors and would never wear a nose ring. But they think diverse places are more interesting and authentic, and more hospitable to outsiders who want to come in and settle for a while.
As Richard Florida sees it, the number of gays in a community is a proxy for tolerance. Gays may therefore serve as a bellwether of a city’s economic fortunes. “Homosexuality represents the last frontier of diversity in our society, and thus a place that welcomes the gay community welcomes all kinds of people,” Florida writes. “Openness to the gay community is a good indicator of the low entry barriers to human capital that are so important to spurring creativity and generating high-tech growth.”
Gates sees a more direct link between gays and economic development, especially when it comes to gentrification of run-down urban neighborhoods. Real estate developers have known for years that the sight of rainbow flags hanging from front porches — the symbol of “gay pride” — is also a sign of newly fixed-up homes and a neighborhood on the rebound. Now Gates has data showing that gay couples are more likely than others to settle in places with slightly higher rates of crime but where home values are also jumping. Gays, it seems, are good at playing the role of “urban pioneers,” making sketchy neighborhoods feel safe enough that young professionals and others will follow.
Why is this? For one thing, most gays are childless, so struggling city school systems aren’t an issue for them. Gays, especially gay couples, also have money to pump into real estate, not because they all hold high-paying jobs — a largely inaccurate stereotype — but because they don’t carry the considerable costs of raising children. Gates, who is about to publish a book called “The Gay and Lesbian Atlas,” has another theory for why gays are more willing to gamble on depressed neighborhoods. “It could be that gay and lesbian people are less risk averse,” Gates says. “They’ve already taken the risk of coming out of the closet, so it could be that they’re willing to take more risk in other dimensions of their lives as well.”
TARGETS OF RECRUITMENT
Urban experts had been talking about these ideas for years before Gary Gates and Richard Florida began measuring them. But it’s only recently that some cities have set out deliberately to fashion a gay-friendly image for themselves.
Baltimore, for one, is zeroing in on the gay role in gentrification. The local government there is touting its relatively cheap stock of historic homes, trying to woo homebuyers from pricey Washington, D.C., an hour down the road. Part of that campaign is a direct appeal to gays. The nonprofit group Live Baltimore, which gets some of its funding from the city, took out an ad in D.C.’s gay newspaper. The ad shows a picture of a giant old row house above a provocative headline: “Completely stripped and ready for you to have your way with it.”
Several Sun Belt cities, notably Fort Lauderdale, Key West and Palm Springs, have been targeting gay and lesbian tourists for several years. Now Philadelphia, a much bigger place with no beach resorts to boast about, is doing the same thing. Last year, the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corp. added a gay-travel link on its Web site, www.gophila.com, and published a gay travel guide titled “The City of Brotherly Love (and Sisterly Affection)”. The group, which receives both city and state funds, is embarking on a more ambitious $250,000 marketing campaign aimed entirely at homosexual travelers, promoting historical attractions and gay nightlife.
Other city efforts are more symbolic. Six years ago, Chicago designated a gay neighborhood known as Boystown as a “gay business district.” The city put up $3.2 million for streetscape improvements, including rainbow-colored, art deco pylons on the sidewalks. (Ironically, the area has since become a popular place for straight couples to live). Last year, Jane Campbell became the first mayor of Cleveland to march in the local gay pride parade. She also raised a rainbow flag over City Hall, the first time one had flown there.
Cleveland is at the forefront of cities that are giving the gay community an official channel for airing concerns. Campbell last year appointed the first openly gay member of the city’s Community Relations Board, an agency that fields complaints from residents and tries to resolve community conflicts. The mayor of St. Louis has appointed a liaison to the gay and lesbian community, as have the police departments in Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Salt Lake City.
Do these symbolic gestures add up to much? Yes and no, says Craig Covey, the first gay councilman in Ferndale, Michigan, a Detroit suburb. Covey, along with an influx of other gays, moved to Ferndale in the late 1980s. Since then, Ferndale’s once-dead downtown has come alive with activity day and night, catering to gay and straight alike. Oddly, though, from a gay perspective, Ferndale has none of the “right” laws on the books. Meanwhile Detroit, which was one of the first cities to pass an anti-discrimination law back in the 1970s, is not a big gay hub.
Why? In a word: crime. “Gays love decaying areas that were once grand and are now shabby,” Covey says. “But before you can get to that, people have to feel safe. It doesn’t matter whether you’ve got a gay bar in town or if the president of your city council will come speak at a gay pride dinner. If you’re afraid to walk a few blocks down the street, then how gay is that?”
Is a gay population an engine of urban revival? Cities are beginning to think so.
By CHRISTOPHER SWOPE
http://www.governing.com/articles/10gays.htm
It was an unusual pep rally for a conservative place like Cincinnati. Seventy-five volunteers crammed into the multi-purpose room of the First Unitarian Church to hear New York organizer Sarah Reece tell them to go out and knock on doors and collect signatures. A fiery speaker with short-cropped hair and dressed in tan overalls, Reece prepared the mostly white posse of teenagers, senior citizens and every age in between for a day of awkward chitchat. “We’re going to talk to people and use the word ’gay,’ ” she cried. “Everyone say it — gay!”
Not all of the men listening to Reece were gay, nor were all the women in the room lesbians. Probably half of the volunteers, in fact, were straight. What brought them together was anger toward a unique Cincinnati law known as Article 12. Lots of cities allow discrimination against gays and lesbians. But Cincinnati is the only place where that principle is written into the very charter. Even if elected officials there wanted to pass an anti-discrimination law, Article 12 would stop them from doing it.
So on this sunny Saturday in August, the volunteers charged out into Cincinnati’s neighborhoods to gin up support for repealing Article 12. This marked the first time gay-rights activists had gone door to door in Cincinnati. The point of it all, Reece made clear, was not just to collect enough signatures to get a repeal measure on the ballot. It was to engage Cincinnatians on their doorsteps in a frank conversation about gays and lesbians — perhaps uncomfortably frank — and to alter public opinion, one handshake at a time. “Most folks have never had someone stand on their porch and say ’gay’ before!” Reece hollered. “It will change the way they think about gay people — if they’ve ever thought about them at all!”
As in any grassroots campaign, these canvassers, whether gay or straight, were motivated by conviction. In their view, no person should be fired from a job or be denied a place to live simply for being gay. But there is another argument for repealing Article 12, and support for it is building in Cincinnati from an unlikely source: the corporate community. There is a growing sense among Cincinnati’s business leaders that the city’s reputation for hostility toward gays and lesbians is taking an economic toll on the region and its ability to attract a top-quality workforce. Article 12, they say, is symptomatic of a mindset that turns away not only talented gay workers but also legions of creative straight people who are the key to growing jobs and wealth in the global economy.
And even more surprising, much of the momentum within business ranks is coming from the Cincinnati corporation with perhaps the stodgiest historical reputation: Procter & Gamble. P&G thinks Cincinnati must become more gay-friendly if it wants to reverse its steady decline in population. Internally, the company has changed policies so that the domestic partners of gay employees get the same benefits package as the spouses of married workers. Now P&G wants Cincinnati to take the next step and repeal Article 12. According to Louise Hughes, the firm’s director of Ohio government relations, Article 12 is a significant obstacle to corporate recruiting efforts. “We recruit employees fresh out of college,” Hughes says. “They think Cincinnati is not inclusive and that it could be a reflection that we’re an intolerant community. That doesn’t appeal to Generation Y.”
FACE TO FACE
It’s too early to tell whether Cincinnatians will repeal Article 12 when they get a chance to, probably in November of next year. What is clear, however, is that the terms of debate about gays are changing, not just in Cincinnati but in cities around the country. It seems that a new relationship is forming between cities and their gay and lesbian populations. Politically, local gay activism is coming out of the closet: Campaigns such as the one in Cincinnati are counting on open, face-to-face conversations to win public support. At the same time, new research supports the argument that Procter & Gamble is making, that there is a link between gays — or at least acceptance of them — and urban economic vitality.
Since the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York launched the modern gay-rights movement, cities have been by far the major focus of gay and lesbian activism. Gays have always liked big cities for their protective anonymity, so when they began to push for legal protections it was logical for them to start there. Today, even as a national debate brews over same-sex marriage, cities are still the center of action. As of the end of last year, according to the Washington, D.C.-based Human Rights Campaign, 119 cities had passed laws prohibiting workplace discrimination based on sexual preference. Some 140 cities or local government agencies now offer domestic partner benefits for public employees. Meanwhile, Christian conservatives have launched an urban counter-offensive, winning many local-level battles to repeal these policies or trying to override them at the state or federal level.
But the most striking new development is the growing number of blue-collar cities never considered especially friendly to gays that are passing gay-rights laws anyway. They seem to be saying that if gays need cities, then cities also need gays — whatever one may think about the homosexual lifestyle itself. “Quite apart from whether you approve or disapprove of gays and what they do in the privacy of their bedroom, there’s now ample evidence that you don’t want to alienate that population,” says Terry Grundy, a professor at the University of Cincinnati’s School of Planning. “In fact, you want to attract them.”
Much of this evidence comes from the work of Gary Gates, a researcher at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C., and Richard Florida, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Gates was one of the first to study where gays and lesbians live, and has developed a statistical measure he calls the “Gay Index.” Florida, meanwhile, studies educated and highly mobile workers who are the new muscle of the U.S. economy, workers employed in information technology, health care, finance, the arts, science and other knowledge-based fields whom he calls the “creative class.” Putting their research together, Gates and Florida found that cities where lots of creative types live — places such as San Francisco, Austin and Madison, Wisconsin — also tend to have large gay populations.
PROMOTING ACCEPTANCE
What does this mean? Economic development officials around the country have been snapping up copies of Richard Florida’s book, “The Rise of the Creative Class,” in an effort to find out. Florida doesn’t argue that homosexuals are more creative than heterosexuals. And he’s not saying that gays are the secret of urban salvation. But he does make the case that in today’s knowledge economy, where younger people especially jump from job to job and move from city to city, the cultural attributes of place matter more than the old virtues of corporate loyalty.
And one of the many things the creative class looks for in a place to live, the argument goes, is tolerance, not just toward gays but toward people who have purple hair, wear nose rings or are culturally distinctive in almost any way at all. The individuals who Richard Florida studies, more often than not, are in fact straight, don’t die their hair odd colors and would never wear a nose ring. But they think diverse places are more interesting and authentic, and more hospitable to outsiders who want to come in and settle for a while.
As Richard Florida sees it, the number of gays in a community is a proxy for tolerance. Gays may therefore serve as a bellwether of a city’s economic fortunes. “Homosexuality represents the last frontier of diversity in our society, and thus a place that welcomes the gay community welcomes all kinds of people,” Florida writes. “Openness to the gay community is a good indicator of the low entry barriers to human capital that are so important to spurring creativity and generating high-tech growth.”
Gates sees a more direct link between gays and economic development, especially when it comes to gentrification of run-down urban neighborhoods. Real estate developers have known for years that the sight of rainbow flags hanging from front porches — the symbol of “gay pride” — is also a sign of newly fixed-up homes and a neighborhood on the rebound. Now Gates has data showing that gay couples are more likely than others to settle in places with slightly higher rates of crime but where home values are also jumping. Gays, it seems, are good at playing the role of “urban pioneers,” making sketchy neighborhoods feel safe enough that young professionals and others will follow.
Why is this? For one thing, most gays are childless, so struggling city school systems aren’t an issue for them. Gays, especially gay couples, also have money to pump into real estate, not because they all hold high-paying jobs — a largely inaccurate stereotype — but because they don’t carry the considerable costs of raising children. Gates, who is about to publish a book called “The Gay and Lesbian Atlas,” has another theory for why gays are more willing to gamble on depressed neighborhoods. “It could be that gay and lesbian people are less risk averse,” Gates says. “They’ve already taken the risk of coming out of the closet, so it could be that they’re willing to take more risk in other dimensions of their lives as well.”
TARGETS OF RECRUITMENT
Urban experts had been talking about these ideas for years before Gary Gates and Richard Florida began measuring them. But it’s only recently that some cities have set out deliberately to fashion a gay-friendly image for themselves.
Baltimore, for one, is zeroing in on the gay role in gentrification. The local government there is touting its relatively cheap stock of historic homes, trying to woo homebuyers from pricey Washington, D.C., an hour down the road. Part of that campaign is a direct appeal to gays. The nonprofit group Live Baltimore, which gets some of its funding from the city, took out an ad in D.C.’s gay newspaper. The ad shows a picture of a giant old row house above a provocative headline: “Completely stripped and ready for you to have your way with it.”
Several Sun Belt cities, notably Fort Lauderdale, Key West and Palm Springs, have been targeting gay and lesbian tourists for several years. Now Philadelphia, a much bigger place with no beach resorts to boast about, is doing the same thing. Last year, the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corp. added a gay-travel link on its Web site, www.gophila.com, and published a gay travel guide titled “The City of Brotherly Love (and Sisterly Affection)”. The group, which receives both city and state funds, is embarking on a more ambitious $250,000 marketing campaign aimed entirely at homosexual travelers, promoting historical attractions and gay nightlife.
Other city efforts are more symbolic. Six years ago, Chicago designated a gay neighborhood known as Boystown as a “gay business district.” The city put up $3.2 million for streetscape improvements, including rainbow-colored, art deco pylons on the sidewalks. (Ironically, the area has since become a popular place for straight couples to live). Last year, Jane Campbell became the first mayor of Cleveland to march in the local gay pride parade. She also raised a rainbow flag over City Hall, the first time one had flown there.
Cleveland is at the forefront of cities that are giving the gay community an official channel for airing concerns. Campbell last year appointed the first openly gay member of the city’s Community Relations Board, an agency that fields complaints from residents and tries to resolve community conflicts. The mayor of St. Louis has appointed a liaison to the gay and lesbian community, as have the police departments in Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Salt Lake City.
Do these symbolic gestures add up to much? Yes and no, says Craig Covey, the first gay councilman in Ferndale, Michigan, a Detroit suburb. Covey, along with an influx of other gays, moved to Ferndale in the late 1980s. Since then, Ferndale’s once-dead downtown has come alive with activity day and night, catering to gay and straight alike. Oddly, though, from a gay perspective, Ferndale has none of the “right” laws on the books. Meanwhile Detroit, which was one of the first cities to pass an anti-discrimination law back in the 1970s, is not a big gay hub.
Why? In a word: crime. “Gays love decaying areas that were once grand and are now shabby,” Covey says. “But before you can get to that, people have to feel safe. It doesn’t matter whether you’ve got a gay bar in town or if the president of your city council will come speak at a gay pride dinner. If you’re afraid to walk a few blocks down the street, then how gay is that?”