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The nearby Chicago suburb of Berwyn has sought to take advantage of rising prices and growing acceptance.
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And what that did is force a lot of the gay population to other neighborhoods in the city and elsewhere." "The real estate went through the roof, the people who live here became wealthier and the baby buggies became more predominant. "Just what none of us wanted to see happen has happened," Thomas says. The bars, long a center of gay life in gayborhoods, are changing, too. Many of the straight residents he interviewed for his book, Ghaziani says, didn't even think of Boystown as a gay neighborhood. In a sign of changing tastes, Ghaziani notes that many of the sex shops that dotted the neighborhood's landscape have closed and been replaced by nail salons. It's the highest concentration in Chicago, but Ghaziani says other neighborhoods in the city and suburbs are catching up.īoystown still has a monument of rainbow pride pylons and plaques honoring gay and lesbian pioneers along Halsted Street, the main thoroughfare bisecting the neighborhood that includes the nation's largest LGBT community center, a bathhouse and plenty of gay bars and clubs.Īnd Boystown, which proudly claims itself as the nation's first municipally recognized gay neighborhood, soon will open one of the USA's first affordable housing developments meant to benefit the needs of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender seniors.īut Halsted Street these days is filled with more strollers pushed by straight couples who are drawn to the neighborhood's proximity to the lakefront and an elementary school that is regarded as one of the best in the city's public school system. Here in Chicago, Boystown and its adjacent neighborhood account for about 12% of the city's self-identified same-sex households, according to Census figures. Some of the most rapid dispersal of gays and lesbians is occurring in medium-size cities such as Tacoma, Wash., and Spring Valley, Nev., according to a 2012 study by the University of Washington's Amy Spring. In Seattle, the historically gay-friendly Capitol Hill neighborhood saw same-sex households dive by 23% from 2000 to 2012, while such households were on the rise in nearly every other neighborhood in the city as well as surrounding suburbs.
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The name is meant to evoke the idea that the LGBT community has come a long way toward being inclusive and all-welcoming, and indeed, the crowd is fairly mixed.
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