What Marriage Equality Could Mean for Urban Economies

The United States may have reached the beginning of the end of the gay marriage debates. The Supreme Court decided to hear two gay marriage cases on Friday — United States v. Windsor and Hollingsworth v. Perry — bringing the Defense of Marriage Act and California’s Proposition 8 into the spotlight.

Gary Gates, a scholar at the Williams Institute at UCLA and co-author of The Gay & Lesbian Atlas, has conducted extensive research on the geography of the gay and lesbian population in the country. Gates' work on gay communities shaped my own thinking on the relationship between diversity and economic development. In 2001, we co-authored a report [PDF] for the Brookings Institution outlining our findings on the relationship between tolerance (measured by his "Gay Index" measure) and technology development.