A majority of LGBTQ+ residents say Los Angeles County is a welcoming place, but many of them don’t know if they can afford to live there, according to a countywide survey conducted by UCLA’s Williams Institute.
That the majority of people perceive their hometown to be too expensive is not an unexpected finding for a survey conducted in an extremely expensive area.
But Brad Sears, executive director The Williams InstituteDr. Ted King, who studies sexual orientation and gender identity law, said he was surprised by the repeated concerns about rising costs.
He said that this survey was released under a programme on Tuesday. 123 page reportHe asked directly: If you could speak to a local official, what would you ask them?
The biggest takeaway from the more than 1,000 LGBTQ+ residents is that yes, discrimination is a concern, even in progressive LA County. But affordability of housing, food and other necessities weighed most heavily on their minds.
The survey showed that LBGTQ+ adults were more likely to struggle with food insecurity and homelessness than other LA County residents. They were also more likely to experience depression or attempt suicide.
“L.A. has always been such a beacon for the country,” Sears said. “What’s the point of drawing people here if they can’t afford to live here?”
The survey, which Sears said was the largest survey to gauge the status of the county’s LGBTQ+ residents, used responses collected last year by the county’s public health department, and survey authors also conducted additional follow-up research.
The 1,006 respondents were considered a representative sample of the county’s roughly 665,000 LGBTQ+ residents. Two-thirds were people of color, 14% identified as trans or nonbinary and nearly two in five said they had a disability.
According to Sears, nearly a third live below 200% of the federal poverty level, which is less than $55,000 a year for a family of four.
Many people responding to the survey wrote that they are having difficulty making ends meet. A gay white man in his 60s said he needs money to have “a tolerable retirement that is not filled with worry.” A gay Latina in her 30s said her biggest worry is “not having a roof over (her) head.” For a gay black man in his 50s, the biggest concern was “poverty and housing with black mold.”
“We have a reputation for being an accepting place,” L.A. County Supervisor Lindsay Horvath said at a meeting Tuesday. “But our data makes clear that it is becoming unaffordable for many people who want to come to this safe place.”
The report found that one in three LGBTQ+ residents said their family struggled to get enough food in the past year, while more than one in five non-LGBTQ+ adults said the same. LGBTQ+ adults were nearly twice as likely to have been homeless in the past five years, according to the report.
For transgender and nonbinary people, the disparities were even greater.
The Williams Institute released a companion ReportThe survey, conducted with the TransLatin@ Coalition, found that more than half of transgender and nonbinary residents of LA County were living near the federal poverty line. More than a quarter of trans and nonbinary people were unemployed, while nearly 5% of LA County residents overall were unemployed. Nearly one in five trans and nonbinary people who looked for housing in the past five years believed they had been rejected because of their gender expression.
Although affordability concerns were top of mind, the Williams Institute’s main report found that many LGBTQ+ residents fear discrimination.
Nearly one in 10 people avoided calling the police to avoid “inappropriate behavior.” One in five said they avoided going to public places, such as parks or beaches, in the past year because they feared being harassed. One woman said she was shot at with a paintball gun as she left a gay bar on Sunset Boulevard holding hands with her girlfriend. A nonbinary person said they were misgendered by a signature gatherer outside a grocery store.
“When I told the person they had misgendered me, the person responded that I was violating their political rights of free speech,” the defendant wrote. “This ruined the next few hours of my day.”
Barbara Ferrer, director of the county’s public health department, said this discrimination leads to “profound disparities” in health outcomes for LGBTQ+ residents. More than a third of LGBTQ+ respondents said they had experienced domestic violence. One in 10 said they did not visit health care providers in the past year “out of fear of inappropriate behavior.”
Speakers at Tuesday’s meeting acknowledged there are many reasons the county’s LGBTQ+ residents should be concerned about their safety. Dramatic increase in laws targeting LGBTQ+ Raising voices for people’s rights often leads to protests and threats of violence.
Meanwhile, there have been a number of hate crimes in L.A. County recently — including crimes against the organizations that produced these reports.
The TransLatin@ Coalition, which provides services to transgender, gender nonconforming, and intersex people, was targeted by several people. Bomb threats Sears told supervisors Tuesday that the Williams Institute has new locks, frosted windows and panic buttons.
“And we’re on the UCLA campus,” he said. “Residents are facing a very real threat happening right now in this county.”
