A recent email from Zillow:
We’re marching at Pride 2019 to show our support for the LGBTQ+ community. Because home is more than just an address — it’s the place you belong.
Live where you love
Gayborhoods are often in high demand — but they don’t always carry a high price tag.
We believe all people should live in a world where they feel valued, supported and like they belong.
[Do they want Trump-loving anti-abortion anti-immigration gun-loving Americans to feel “valued, supported, and like they belong”?]
The featured Gayborhoods have a percentage of same-sex couples ranging from 2.3 percent to 7.6 percent:
Zillow explains how they found these: “Census tracts and groupings with the highest percentages of same-sex couple households were matched to the neighborhood that best contained them.”
We are informed by our best minds that between 10 and 20 percent of Americans are gay (Smithsonian reporting on research by National Bureau of Economic Research).
Admittedly not every household contains a couple, but if the 10-20 percent figure is correct, shouldn’t a neighborhood with only 2.3 percent same-sex couples be considered a Straightborhood?
Finally, what percentage of American homes these days are “the place [the occupants] belong”? Does someone who has moved from the other side of the U.S. for school or work “belong”? A person who votes contrary to the prevailing political doctrine in the neighborhood? An undocumented immigrant who can be deported at any time by the not-yet-abolished ICE?
In other words, Zillow loves ghettos. Because encouraging members of a minority to all live in the same neighborhood has never turned out badly before. :-/
I hadn’t thought about it that way, but it does seem that Zillow is encouraging like-minded people to cluster together so that they need never encounter anyone with a differing point of view (would reduce the feeling of belonging).
Also, Zillow would be encouraging Democrats to keep clustering together into states that are already overwhelmingly voting for Democrats. They will belong, but their presidential candidates may lose!
Based on the list of prices, no-one cares if you’re gay in jobless flyover states & they’re more concerned about something else. The San Francisco employees of Zillow need to get those flyover states to stop worrying about their jobs & focus on more important things.
My family name is Gay, so everywhere I live is a gayborhood.
On a separate note, I’d like my family name back. Let the gays call themselves Greenspuns (or some other misfortunate family’s last name)!
The Smithsonian should have better reporting. At least they link to the original paper:
https://www.nber.org/papers/w19508
The 10-20% figure is explicitly not representative of the general population, but of a highly-skewed internet survey population from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk that the authors sampled. At least the authors of the original paper are honest about their findings once you drill down into the details. Rose Eveleth, on the other hand, summarizing for the Smithsonian, is a hack with an agenda.
Much ‘science’ reporting on LGBT issues ends up coming from academic papers where the study authors, with explicitly liberal biases, have run an online survey of dubious merit.
Less than 5% is much more accurate
Per cent by state.
I would expect the per cent born to be the same everywhere but some may have more trouble admitting it and others may move to more tolerant locations.
https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/research/data-in-review-2018/
I remember reading an article that said that Burning Man’s Black Rock City has more LGBTQ… people per capita than even the gayest of San Francisco neighborhoods. (Although this must be somewhat skewed by all the bisexual women)
Don’t be a sucker and buy ZG stock.