https://www.advocate.com/exclusives/lgbtq-homeowner-disparities-congress-letter
Twenty U.S. representatives are demanding to know about the homeownership "disparities" between LGBTQ+ people and their straight, cisgender peers.
They disproportionately move to LGBT tolerant places, which tend to be expensive metro areas or blue states where real estate is expensive.
I know right! Why can’t more socially progressive places also be economically progressive.
Not everyone can afford an education or have enough support and stability to keep working their way towards it.
For crying out loud. The whole foods plant based diet is 30% cheaper and yet the places that also have the most vegans is also likely to be the most expensive.
ah, you see, turns out supply/demand isn't actually a thing =D, don't get me wrong, it's fine and all until you remember that there are things people can not live without
While there's a lot of fine print reasons, I'd imagine it all goes back to 1 thing. Bigotry.
A lot of gay people are kicked out of their homes as children, because they are gay.
A lot of straight people get help from their parents that allows them to purchase their first home.
These are likely connected to that 5% difference..
Also, what's the cost to medically transition in the states? I bet that also prevents you from being able to get a down-payment together, even if you don't face workplace issues stemming from you being true to yourself.
In addition to being disinherited, discrimination, moving to more expensive bluer areas that are more tolerant, and such that people have already touched on, and I'm sure are significant factors at play, I just kind of want to spitball a couple thoughts. I'm no sociologist or economist or anything of the sort so I don't know how much these thoughts hold water
The sort of stereotypical American dream- husband & wife, 2.5 kids, 2 cars, house in the suburbs, etc. probably looks at least a little different for many LGBTQ people. In many cases, the kids are kind of a non-starter- adoption, IVF, surrogacy, etc. are out of reach for a lot of people for a few different reasons, and if you're not planning around having kids, you may not need that house in the suburbs with a good school district and a yard for them to play in. And if you're not spending money on kids, you may want to spend that money elsewhere, it may be more important to you to be close to other things, or to not have a mortgage hanging over you're head and want to be able to move to a different neighborhood, city, state, or maybe even country every few years when your lease is up.
I'm a fairly stereotypical straight dude, I grew up holding the flashlight for my dad and getting yelled at while he fixed pretty much everything around the house himself, and it gave me a pretty solid foundation as a handyman. There's not much around a house that I'm not confident I could fix myself or with a couple buddies if I needed to, and I suspect that a lot of girls and probably many gay guys have a different experience with that kind of thing in their childhoods. Not that they can't learn those skills on their own later on in life if they want/need to, but it can be a pretty daunting prospect, and I could see a lot of people who didn't grow up learning those skills choosing to live in an apartment or rental house where they can just call maintenance or their landlord when something breaks instead of needing to learn a bunch of plumbing, electrical, carpentry, drywall, etc on the fly as your house is falling apart around you. I'm not sure I'd want to take on home ownership if I had to start from square one and relearn everything I picked up from my dad on my own.
Lol your points are very reasonable, but that part about gay dudes not being familiar with home improvement is pretty goofy/baseless. I'm not mad, just acknowledging the outdated stereotype. Gay kids learn from their fathers same as you.
A lot of them absolutely do learn those skills the same way I did
But for a lot of parent/child relationships, being gay can still be a pretty big stumbling block. If your dad is rejecting you, doesn't want anything to do with you, maybe even kicking you out of his house, you're not going to be able to learn anything from him. If he's overall supportive but worried about not wanting to push you into traditional gender roles and ideas of masculinity and such that you may not identify with, he may not try hard enough to pass those skills on. If a kid coming to terms with his sexual orientation feels pressured to act a certain way because of pressure from his peers or society, he may push back against his parents trying to teach him those skills, etc.
It's not unique to being the father of a gay son, lots of parents struggle to find ways to bond with their kids who have different personalities, interests, opinions, etc. than they do, but being gay can throw an extra level of complications into the mix and so I suspect you'd see it at least somewhat more among gay guys than otherwise comparable straight guys.
Here's a link to the actual study:
https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/2024-02/Why_Are_There_Gaps_in_LGBTQ%2B_Homeownership.pdf
Unfortunately the link was broken in the article and the article itself didn't have a lot of detail. I think this led to most of the comments here as saying "oh this is just because such and such factor" which yes of course everything people are saying are all factors and they're specifically listed as factors in the report. But the gap still remained when controlling for those factors too, including lgbt people living in more expensive areas (and even with that, the reason they're in more expensive areas is because those areas have more tolerant policies, also nicely laid out in the report).
I'd be interested if they took samples of home ownership across LGBTQ+ and cis populations in geographies with high acceptance of LGBTQ+ populations. Do we see parity in this case? Could it be that geographies that contain accepting societies all have low home ownership?
As in, could places where higher home ownership exist not overlap with LGBTQ+ acceptance?
Give me one example of an "accepting society"
Gay marriage may be legal, but nowhere in this world exists true equality. So what I'm saying is, it'd be impossible to reliably gather research comparing more accepting and less accepting places, because the overwhelmingly conservative climate still exists regardless of minor differences in public sentiment.
I imagine a gay couple living in the Castro District in San Fransisco experiences a different level acceptance than if that same couple were living in Birmingham Alabama.
Uhh... Am I the only one who says "because LGBTQ persons make up like 10% of the population?" I'm pretty sure the headline left out a "proportionally" somewhere but... Hmmm.
Agreed. The real problem is affordability. Most people are already priced out and it continues to get worse.
I believe it's cos LGBTQ+ people are a minor biological abnormality.. I mean, common sense tell me LGBTQ+ people are like 10% of population so they will obviously be less homeowners.
The article makes it clear that it's proportional, not absolute.
But what do I know, I'm just a "minority biological abnormality" apparently
bad title, the actual article is talking about the percentage of each that own homes, not expecting half of all homes to be owned by LGBTQ people
Just wanted to inform you that your vocabulary is flawed. Homosexuality is a minority, not an abnormality. Homosexuality is completely normal among pretty most intelligent mammals on this planet.
It's actually lower than 10%. I had always commonly heard 10% and was shocked to learn that it's more like 4.5%.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/259571/americans-greatly-overestimate-gay-population.aspx
It's like 40% in those under 18 because of social pressures from the LGBTQ community. And less than 1% in those over like...50 or something...
It's because they're represented far greater than is proportional for their community.
Like, you'll never see a dark black person on TV, or almost any Asian people. But guaranteed there will be a VERY light skinned black person, and someone who's gay at the very least. Almost never any hispanic people in our television either.
TBH IDK why there is so much woke hype about LGBTQ+ here on lemmy, trans here trans there.. I believe it's more like some kind of propaganda to get votes from young people.
People here give too much importance for 4.5% of the population.
Because that 4.5% of the population is deserving of the same human rights as anyone else, and when they are denied those rights, they are more susceptible to abuse and suicide.
Yeah I mean I understand that point, what I cannot understand it's why the media it's pushing and pushing and pushing it over and over again.
I think it's good caring about LGBTQ+ people, but personally I reached a point when seeing it every single day in the news over and over again become a meh.
Malnutrition in children not only in America but throughout the world is a more worrying issue than that and I don't see anyone pushing it over and over again every single day.
People have not stopped talking about queer rights, because nothing has changed for the better, except for symbolic things like marriage which do nothing to improve actual quality of life.
As for malnutrition, why do you think food assistance programs exist? While it may not be under a political spotlight, food security is indeed a relevant current issue. Just because you haven't read about it recently doesn't mean it's being ignored.
You should try to understand the limits of your own perspective.