The Huge Business Opportunity for the open hearted!
Fly a big flag, get big money. Simple capitalism in a ultra-simplistic, brilliant community building generator.
Gay culture that is getting more widely accepted by the general society. A byproduct of that acceptance and the is making it harder for gay people to find each other. Its pretty easy for many of the Bay Area cities and towns to create a gay ghetto somewhere in it. Somewhere we can find each other and create functional families and support systems that are still needed in the community while the physical community is being dismantled at a rate that it cannot sustain in order for the creation of a new ghetto or other solution to materialize naturally and organically. So just make it happen!
Right now the SF housing market is pushing all the gays out, they are looking for a place to call home! Evictions for Ellis Act move-ins are just going too fast to respond to the problem fast enough. Many that are in this ‘class war’ against techies and busing would say that this is true for the culture in SF in general right now as well.
Its not just a thought, its just not true, sort of…..
Relocating a mainstream popular culture or a group of people through displacement from a changing housing or job market allows people to move and re-create that culture, it just isn’t in the same location. The same cannot be said for sub-cultures. How many are talking about how all the Mission displaced people are moving to Oakland?
So if you want to see all of your old neighbors you can just move on over to Oakland and displace someone there to have your neighbors and culture back. Yes, its a little tongue in cheek, because there is always humor in the truth. The minorities and poor getting displaced from Oakland are moving north to Richmond. Although I don’t see many of the mostly white, middle class, Oaklanders that are having to move to Oakland for the high SF housing costs talking about the Black People being priced out of Oakland to Richmond.
How many gay neighborhoods do you know of outside of the Castro?
Honestly, a really smart developer would get a local collection of business and home owners and get a HUGE rainbow flag, and put up a huge flag in the middle of a nice part of town. Someplace like say, Piedmont or out in the next Valley near Danville. Young gay people looking for a place to rent or a first place to buy would find a town that loves the gays! Instead of SF where they may make 100k each a year, but they still can’t afford to buy a house here.
Why is this important?
If you create a permanent announcement that “gays of all kinds are welcome here” and get your first wave of gay people moving into the neighborhood. After that it’ll just happen on its own. They know from the get-go when they move into that part of town that they will be able to find each others like them again.
Once others can move there and know that other gay people are already here to become family with it means something. Little things like Orphan Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners and even presents to open with the other couples in the neighborhood. Or having singles events to play matchmaker for your friends to see if any click and end up falling in love. These are things that tend to happen more often in the gay world because we can’t just go out to bars or regular events if we’re not “acting gay” anymore, but we still need to find each other for all of this to happen!
