How Gay Populations Influence Housing Prices

Exactly how gay populations affect the urban housing market is something of an open question. On one hand, surveys have found that gays and lesbians believe they've been targets of housing discrimination at times [PDF]. If a neighborhood doesn't want gay people to live there, one might expect its average home values to drop. On the other hand, research from 331 metro areas by our own Richard Florida has found that artist and gay populations increase housing prices in urban neighborhoods [PDF], because these groups produce amenities that are at a premium and reflect a tolerance that facilitates the exchange of knowledge and ideas.

New research, scheduled for publication in the March 2012 issue of the Journal of Urban Economics [pre-press PDF], tries to settle these conflicting findings by focusing on a single city: Columbus, Ohio. The leaders of the study, economists David Christafore of Konkuk University in Korea and Susane Leguizamon of Tulane University, wanted to see if home values in various neighborhoods of Columbus responded differently to the presence of gay populations. They wanted to discover whether any real estate fluctuations might turn on a single key factor: the neighborhood's sociopolitical slant.