For Sale to Family Only: Notes on Gays, Gentrification, and Exclusion

This paper argues that gentrified urban gay ghettoes, far from being the natural and inevitable locus of contemporary gay residential concentration, were shaped as much by straight real estate developers as by any distinctive relationship between gay people and the urban landscape. Examining the Lakeview district on Chicago’s North Side, this paper argues that the neighborhood’s emergence as a gentrified gay enclave was shaped by externally driven changes in the built environment, especially the successful efforts of real estate developers to purchase and demolish single-family homes that had declined in value and replace them with apartment buildings. In the mid to late 1960s, developers built many “four-plus-one” buildings, so called because they consisted of four floors of apartments atop one floor of ground-level parking, in Lakeview and nearby areas. Built to the maximum permitted height and filling every inch of their lots, these structures maximized profits and sharply increased residential density. In addition, by replacing single-family homes with efficiencies, studios, and one-bedroom apartments, they made the area less attractive to families and more hospitable to single adults without children. Longtime residents actively resisted this increase in non-“family” housing, in terms that reflected both an anti-developer and anti-corporate sentiment and also sometimes an antipathy toward lesbians, gays, and others perceived as “transients.” By connecting the rise of visible gay neighborhoods to shifts in capitalist political economy, then, this paper offers a historical corrective to facile assumptions about the relationship between gays and urban neighborhood change.