BTinSF
02-25-2007, 07:13 PM
Good NIMBYism or bad NIMBYism??
S.F.'s Castro district faces an identity crisis
As straights move in, some fear loss of the area's character
Wyatt Buchanan, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, February 25, 2007
To walk down San Francisco's Castro Street -- where men casually embrace on sidewalks in the shadow of an enormous rainbow flag -- the neighborhood's status as "gay Mecca" seems obvious.
But up and down the enclave that has been a symbol of gay culture for more than three decades, heterosexuals are moving in. They have come to enjoy some of the same amenities that have attracted the neighborhood's many gay and lesbian residents: charming houses, convenient public transportation, safe streets and nice weather.
The integration of gay and straight is increasingly evident not only in the Castro District but across North America, from Chicago to New York City to Toronto, where urban revitalization is bringing new residents at the same time some gays are settling in other parts of cities or the suburbs -- such as the East Bay.
But some gay and lesbian residents of the Castro are worried that the culture and history of their world-famous neighborhood could be lost in the process, and they have started a campaign to preserve its character. The city, meanwhile, is spending $100,000 on a plan aimed at keeping the area's gay identity intact.
Heterosexuals "are welcome as long as they understand this is our community," said Adam Light, a leader in the Castro Coalition, a group formed eight months ago to address the shifts in the neighborhood in recent years.
In San Francisco, the line between the Castro and nearby Noe Valley has blurred, said Aldo Congi, a San Francisco native and vice president of McGuire Real Estate who has sold property in the city since 1979. In the 1970s, the gay revolution in the Castro was shocking to straight people, including him.
"There used to be demarcation, where straight families would want to be in Noe and gay families or couples in the Castro," Congi said. "I think it's much more integrated now. I don't think there's any question about that."
While evidence of the change is largely anecdotal, estimates based on census data from 2000 and 2005 show that San Francisco and other major cities in the United States are losing gay and lesbian couples, while Oakland, Berkeley and San Jose gained couples, according to a UCLA demographer.
The Castro's gay and lesbian residents need to be actively involved in neighborhood planning if they want to see the area maintain its identity, said Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, chair of the School of Public Affairs and Urban Planning at UCLA.
"It's very difficult to stop change," she said. "But you can try to direct it in ways that you like as opposed to ways that you hate."
San Francisco's gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community also is helped by its storied history. Thousands of gays and lesbians came to the city at the beginning of the Gay Liberation movement in the late 1960s, settling first in the Haight, where they fixed up Victorian homes. In the 1970s and '80s, many of them moved over the hill to the Castro, where there was less crime.
"I think the only gay neighborhood that is going to survive is the Castro," said Don Reuter, a New York writer who has spent the past seven months documenting the status of gay enclaves in 12 U.S. cities. "In every city this is going on. We're unraveling. Our gay neighborhoods are unraveling," he said.
In Chicago, the core gay neighborhood has moved farther from the urban center as real estate prices have risen. Most gay and lesbian people who own homes now live on the northern edge of the city, said filmmaker Ron Pajak, who is documenting the history of the city's gay community.
A district of gay nightclubs in southern Washington, D.C., is being demolished to make room for a new stadium. And in Toronto, high-rise condos are replacing parking lots in the Gay Village, and more heterosexuals are moving into the neighborhood.
"You can't tell people where to live, and people are making all sorts of decisions," said Kyle Raye, Toronto's first openly gay city councilman who has represented the Gay Village area since 1991. "The lines are blurred; even the police love working (during gay pride events). There are significant social changes that have occurred."
Still, gay and lesbian residents in San Francisco are trying to draw lines around the Castro. Last week, the city began taking bids from consultants to create a plan to guide development of at least nine major properties and vacant lots on Market Street.
Supervisor Bevan Dufty, who represents the area and is leading the city planning process, sees the effort as a "community visioning process" that will include the creation of smaller units of affordable housing for young people and the elderly.
"I think we can do things in the next four to five years that will sustain us for the next 40," Dufty said.
He also wants development that will create spaces for community institutions such as Theater Rhinoceros, which bills itself as the city's "queer theater," and organizations that assist people who have HIV and AIDS. But his biggest goal is to create a permanent home in the neighborhood for the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society's archives, along with a museum.
"People from around the world go to the Castro, and there is precious little they can access to know our history," he said.
That history was not a factor when Rachel Beckert and her husband decided to move their family to a flat on Eureka Street in the heart of the Castro three years ago.
"The only thing that meant anything to me was the area would be nice," said Beckert on a recent day, as she watched her son and daughter ramble through the playground at the Eureka Valley Recreation Center a block from the center of the Castro Street shopping district. Eureka Valley is the historic name for the neighborhood that once had many Irish and German residents, some of whom still live there.
Beckert's brother, sister-in-law and their children moved into the flat below them. They picked the neighborhood for its location, safety and proximity to shopping -- attributes that attract many.
At first, Beckert wondered if her family's presence would provoke a backlash from gay and lesbian residents, but she says they have been friendly. She rejects suggestions that families like hers should live in other neighborhoods.
"You could also say this neighborhood used to be full of families," she said, adding that neighbors on both sides of her building lived in the Castro before it became a gay enclave.
The blocks surrounding the recreation center and the Beckerts' home have the highest concentration of gay and lesbian residents in the Castro -- as high as 95 percent, according to an estimate based on 2000 census data by Gary Gates, a senior research fellow at the UCLA School of Law's Williams Institute, which tracks demographic data of gays and lesbians. According to the estimate, the proportion of gay and lesbian residents ranges from about 80 percent to 30 percent elsewhere in the area.
Using census data to look at population shifts over time is more difficult. Between 2000 and 2005, same-sex couples in San Francisco declined by about 5 percent, Gates estimates. The rate was 2 1/2 times that of heterosexual couples.
The trend is also apparent in Philadelphia, Washington, New York, Houston, Detroit and Austin, Texas, according to the estimate. The population of same-sex couples in Oakland, Berkeley and San Jose, meanwhile, appeared to increase during the period -- San Jose by 34 percent, Oakland by 14 percent and Berkeley by 8 percent.
Along Castro Street, merchants are seeing another trend: high turnover among shops as business owners struggle to afford rents that are among the highest in the city.
"We need to find and attract new businesses to the neighborhood," said Paul Moffett, president of the Merchants of Upper Market and Castro. "They may not be gay-owned, but the bottom line is we want a vibrant, successful and healthy business community. Whether gay, Chinese, African American or owned by women, it doesn't matter."
Perhaps the central question expressed in community forums about the future of the Castro is whether gays and lesbians should assimilate into mainstream culture as they gain acceptance -- or maintain a separate place.
"Having a specific neighborhood politicians can point to, can go to and shake hands or kiss lesbian babies, has really solidified the gay vote, our political muscle," said longtime community activist Tommi Avicolli Mecca at a forum in November.
He said places that are free from anti-gay violence and discrimination are important refuges. But other people believe anti-gay sentiment will fade over time.
San Francisco Convention and Visitors Bureau chief Joe D'Alessandro, who lives in the Castro with his gay partner and their six children, said he thinks gay enclaves marginalize the people who live there. He said the gay community in his previous home of Portland, Ore., a city without a historically gay neighborhood, is a model because gay and lesbian residents comfortably live in the mainstream.
"They do not live in a ghetto," D'Alessandro said, "and I think they're stronger because of it."
Castro forum on gay neighborhoods
The third in a series of forums about gay neighborhoods and urban planning will be held Tuesday from 6 to 8 p.m at the Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgender Historical Society, 657 Mission St., Suite 300, San Francisco.
Speakers include Don Reuter, a New York writer working on a book on the rise of gay neighborhoods and the challenges they face. For more information, go to glbthistory.org.
http://www.sfgate.com/c/pictures/2007/02/25/ba_all_castro12_036_ls.jpghttp://www.sfgate.com/c/pictures/2007/02/25/mn_wb_castro25_005_suzu.jpg
E-mail Wyatt Buchanan at wbuchanan@sfchronicle.com.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/02/25/MNG2DOATDK1.DTL
S.F.'s Castro district faces an identity crisis
As straights move in, some fear loss of the area's character
Wyatt Buchanan, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, February 25, 2007
To walk down San Francisco's Castro Street -- where men casually embrace on sidewalks in the shadow of an enormous rainbow flag -- the neighborhood's status as "gay Mecca" seems obvious.
But up and down the enclave that has been a symbol of gay culture for more than three decades, heterosexuals are moving in. They have come to enjoy some of the same amenities that have attracted the neighborhood's many gay and lesbian residents: charming houses, convenient public transportation, safe streets and nice weather.
The integration of gay and straight is increasingly evident not only in the Castro District but across North America, from Chicago to New York City to Toronto, where urban revitalization is bringing new residents at the same time some gays are settling in other parts of cities or the suburbs -- such as the East Bay.
But some gay and lesbian residents of the Castro are worried that the culture and history of their world-famous neighborhood could be lost in the process, and they have started a campaign to preserve its character. The city, meanwhile, is spending $100,000 on a plan aimed at keeping the area's gay identity intact.
Heterosexuals "are welcome as long as they understand this is our community," said Adam Light, a leader in the Castro Coalition, a group formed eight months ago to address the shifts in the neighborhood in recent years.
In San Francisco, the line between the Castro and nearby Noe Valley has blurred, said Aldo Congi, a San Francisco native and vice president of McGuire Real Estate who has sold property in the city since 1979. In the 1970s, the gay revolution in the Castro was shocking to straight people, including him.
"There used to be demarcation, where straight families would want to be in Noe and gay families or couples in the Castro," Congi said. "I think it's much more integrated now. I don't think there's any question about that."
While evidence of the change is largely anecdotal, estimates based on census data from 2000 and 2005 show that San Francisco and other major cities in the United States are losing gay and lesbian couples, while Oakland, Berkeley and San Jose gained couples, according to a UCLA demographer.
The Castro's gay and lesbian residents need to be actively involved in neighborhood planning if they want to see the area maintain its identity, said Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, chair of the School of Public Affairs and Urban Planning at UCLA.
"It's very difficult to stop change," she said. "But you can try to direct it in ways that you like as opposed to ways that you hate."
San Francisco's gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community also is helped by its storied history. Thousands of gays and lesbians came to the city at the beginning of the Gay Liberation movement in the late 1960s, settling first in the Haight, where they fixed up Victorian homes. In the 1970s and '80s, many of them moved over the hill to the Castro, where there was less crime.
"I think the only gay neighborhood that is going to survive is the Castro," said Don Reuter, a New York writer who has spent the past seven months documenting the status of gay enclaves in 12 U.S. cities. "In every city this is going on. We're unraveling. Our gay neighborhoods are unraveling," he said.
In Chicago, the core gay neighborhood has moved farther from the urban center as real estate prices have risen. Most gay and lesbian people who own homes now live on the northern edge of the city, said filmmaker Ron Pajak, who is documenting the history of the city's gay community.
A district of gay nightclubs in southern Washington, D.C., is being demolished to make room for a new stadium. And in Toronto, high-rise condos are replacing parking lots in the Gay Village, and more heterosexuals are moving into the neighborhood.
"You can't tell people where to live, and people are making all sorts of decisions," said Kyle Raye, Toronto's first openly gay city councilman who has represented the Gay Village area since 1991. "The lines are blurred; even the police love working (during gay pride events). There are significant social changes that have occurred."
Still, gay and lesbian residents in San Francisco are trying to draw lines around the Castro. Last week, the city began taking bids from consultants to create a plan to guide development of at least nine major properties and vacant lots on Market Street.
Supervisor Bevan Dufty, who represents the area and is leading the city planning process, sees the effort as a "community visioning process" that will include the creation of smaller units of affordable housing for young people and the elderly.
"I think we can do things in the next four to five years that will sustain us for the next 40," Dufty said.
He also wants development that will create spaces for community institutions such as Theater Rhinoceros, which bills itself as the city's "queer theater," and organizations that assist people who have HIV and AIDS. But his biggest goal is to create a permanent home in the neighborhood for the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society's archives, along with a museum.
"People from around the world go to the Castro, and there is precious little they can access to know our history," he said.
That history was not a factor when Rachel Beckert and her husband decided to move their family to a flat on Eureka Street in the heart of the Castro three years ago.
"The only thing that meant anything to me was the area would be nice," said Beckert on a recent day, as she watched her son and daughter ramble through the playground at the Eureka Valley Recreation Center a block from the center of the Castro Street shopping district. Eureka Valley is the historic name for the neighborhood that once had many Irish and German residents, some of whom still live there.
Beckert's brother, sister-in-law and their children moved into the flat below them. They picked the neighborhood for its location, safety and proximity to shopping -- attributes that attract many.
At first, Beckert wondered if her family's presence would provoke a backlash from gay and lesbian residents, but she says they have been friendly. She rejects suggestions that families like hers should live in other neighborhoods.
"You could also say this neighborhood used to be full of families," she said, adding that neighbors on both sides of her building lived in the Castro before it became a gay enclave.
The blocks surrounding the recreation center and the Beckerts' home have the highest concentration of gay and lesbian residents in the Castro -- as high as 95 percent, according to an estimate based on 2000 census data by Gary Gates, a senior research fellow at the UCLA School of Law's Williams Institute, which tracks demographic data of gays and lesbians. According to the estimate, the proportion of gay and lesbian residents ranges from about 80 percent to 30 percent elsewhere in the area.
Using census data to look at population shifts over time is more difficult. Between 2000 and 2005, same-sex couples in San Francisco declined by about 5 percent, Gates estimates. The rate was 2 1/2 times that of heterosexual couples.
The trend is also apparent in Philadelphia, Washington, New York, Houston, Detroit and Austin, Texas, according to the estimate. The population of same-sex couples in Oakland, Berkeley and San Jose, meanwhile, appeared to increase during the period -- San Jose by 34 percent, Oakland by 14 percent and Berkeley by 8 percent.
Along Castro Street, merchants are seeing another trend: high turnover among shops as business owners struggle to afford rents that are among the highest in the city.
"We need to find and attract new businesses to the neighborhood," said Paul Moffett, president of the Merchants of Upper Market and Castro. "They may not be gay-owned, but the bottom line is we want a vibrant, successful and healthy business community. Whether gay, Chinese, African American or owned by women, it doesn't matter."
Perhaps the central question expressed in community forums about the future of the Castro is whether gays and lesbians should assimilate into mainstream culture as they gain acceptance -- or maintain a separate place.
"Having a specific neighborhood politicians can point to, can go to and shake hands or kiss lesbian babies, has really solidified the gay vote, our political muscle," said longtime community activist Tommi Avicolli Mecca at a forum in November.
He said places that are free from anti-gay violence and discrimination are important refuges. But other people believe anti-gay sentiment will fade over time.
San Francisco Convention and Visitors Bureau chief Joe D'Alessandro, who lives in the Castro with his gay partner and their six children, said he thinks gay enclaves marginalize the people who live there. He said the gay community in his previous home of Portland, Ore., a city without a historically gay neighborhood, is a model because gay and lesbian residents comfortably live in the mainstream.
"They do not live in a ghetto," D'Alessandro said, "and I think they're stronger because of it."
Castro forum on gay neighborhoods
The third in a series of forums about gay neighborhoods and urban planning will be held Tuesday from 6 to 8 p.m at the Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgender Historical Society, 657 Mission St., Suite 300, San Francisco.
Speakers include Don Reuter, a New York writer working on a book on the rise of gay neighborhoods and the challenges they face. For more information, go to glbthistory.org.
http://www.sfgate.com/c/pictures/2007/02/25/ba_all_castro12_036_ls.jpghttp://www.sfgate.com/c/pictures/2007/02/25/mn_wb_castro25_005_suzu.jpg
E-mail Wyatt Buchanan at wbuchanan@sfchronicle.com.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/02/25/MNG2DOATDK1.DTL
