Do Gays Really Boost Property Values?

Friends and I frequently joke that if you want to raise property values and spur gentrification, then get the gays and lesbians to move into the neighborhood. We also have been documented as being a good measure of the attractiveness a city to the so-called "creative class." These stereotypes hold true in many areas even in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia, particularly in Norfolk's Ghent area which has transformed itself form borderline slum a number of years ago to one of the most sought after areas replete with shops, restaurants and arts venues. The stereotype even extends to our neighborhood in Hampton which for the most part - sadly, we do have a few reactionary, bigoted residents - is gay friendly and has seen LGBT homeowners make major upgrades to properties. The same phenomenon has even been seen in Cape Charles on Virginia's Eastern Shore. Now a study has conformed the positive influence that gays have on property values. At least in liberal, open minded neighborhoods. In areas favored by conservative bigots, we don't work the same magic. Here are highlights from the Vancouver Sun on some of the new study findings:

A controversial new study suggests that in neighbourhoods where extreme conservatism prevails, the presence of one more same-sex couple for every 1,000 households is linked to a one per cent drop in housing prices. In liberal neighbourhoods, by contrast, researchers find the associated effect of gays and lesbians on housing prices to be positive.

The study, which appears in the Journal of Urban Economics, draws data from more than 20,000 home sales, and controls for such mitigating factors as access to amenities, racial homogeneity, education, income, housing characteristics and quality of nearby schools.

"Gays and lesbians feel that they're not welcome in certain areas," says Susane Leguizamon, a professor of economics at Tulane University. "This study suggests it's not just a feeling; people are responding to the presence of gays and lesbians in the ways we'd expect."

Leguizamon suggests cohabitating same-sex couples are actually quite visible to their neighbours, and thus can have an effect on what people will pay to come or go — much the same way ethnicity has been shown to do in other studies.

She and co-author David Christafore used voting outcomes of the U.S. Defense of Marriage Act to classify neighbourhood values (the Act stated that marriage could only be entered into by a man and a woman), and called on census data to determine the number of same-sex couples in the area.

Affirming previous research, their analysis showed that sexual diversity was positively correlated with housing prices in most neighbourhoods — and most significantly in very liberal areas, dubbed "gaybourhoods."

In communities with high levels of conservatism, however, greater concentrations of same-sex couples was linked with lower housing prices.

Importantly, however, research led by Richard Florida at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management has consistently shown that higher concentrations of gay people are linked with economic prosperity, innovation and creativity within a region.