NEWSLGBT FINANCE

Perhaps it goes without saying that, after the U.S. midterm elections, we would all be tightening out belt. (And by “we,” of course I mean state governments and regular individuals, not the obscenely wealthy, but I digress …)

So it should be no surprise we are seeing, all across the country, state legislatures and governors slashing budgets, just trying to make ends meet. I sympathize, I do. Having no money is horrible and stressful, and at some point, something’s gotta give.

I get it.

But this should not be an excuse to push totally regressive policies, the only aim of which is to further oppress and humiliate.

This is happening in Michigan, where state officials are working to rescind domestic partner benefits in an attempt to cut costs.

Outloud, a gay bookstore in Nashville, announced last week that they will be closing their doors after 15 years of service, making them the latest LGBT literary emporium to go out of business in the recent past.

This and other cessations are symptomatic of our nation's economic malaise, and an illustration of how large companies have squeezed out the little guy.

"The greed of some in the banking industry continues to push interest rates so high that most small businesses can't afford them. Affordable credit is simply not available to most small business owners." OutLoud owners Ted Jensen and Kevin Medley asserted in their outgoing message, which revolved largely around the monetary matters at hand. "Supersized businesses like Amazon, Wal-Mart and Best Buy have unfair price advantages over locally-owned businesses."

Surely big business has squeezed out the little guy, gay and straight alike, but not everyone sees the closings as necessarily negative.

We knew this day would come: the day traditional Republicans and their finance-centric Tea Party allies came to blows over social issues. Whether the GOP and its allies can survive the split, however, remains to be seen.

During this election cycle, money was the name of the game: with anti-incumbent fever spreading like wild fire, candidates and activists on the right, and sometimes the left, consistently called for a new economic future for the United States. For the most part, these groups won their races and will transform the new Congress come January.

Hoping to seize the fiscally conservative zeitgeist, and steer clear of the party's deep-seeded social conservatism, 16 Tea Party groups and the gay GOP organization GOProud last week sent a letter to likely House Speaker John Boehner and Sen. Mitch McConnell urging them to drop any and all efforts to legislate morality. This is an excellent opportunity for progress.

There are many factors you may consider when picking a place to live. How expensive is it? Is it accessible to public transportation? How many bedrooms? Is the neighborhood nice? Perhaps, in light of the recent hate crimes against LGBT people, LGBT home buyers may base their decision on whether or not the neighborhood is LGBT-friendly.

But it turns out, straight people should be considering how gay-friendly the neighborhood is, too. A neighborhood's gay population doesn't only determine how safe it is for LGBT people — it also affects house prices.

According to research by Richard Florida and Charlotta Mellander, neighborhoods with high populations of gay people are more likely to be on the upswing in terms of market values. They created a bohemian-gay index for 331 metropolitan regions in the U.S. The index measured the concentration of creative class individuals, including artists, bohemians, and gay people. They found a positive effect — after controlling for higher incomes, education levels, or population levels, a higher concentration of the creative class did correlate with higher house prices.

So why does a high gay population affect housing prices? Could their research actually be accurate?

By any stretch of the imagination, $743 billion is a lot of money. It is also the projected buying power of the LGBT community in 2010, up from $732 billion in 2009, $712 in 2008, and $690 in 2007. This is an important figure — if we can show the economic value of embracing the LGBT community, it could have a significant impact on the progress of LGBT rights.

The analysis comes from an updated study by Witeck-Combs Communications and Packaged Facts, who have been estimating LGBT buying power for a number of years. The researchers caution, however, that buying power -- "disposable personal income" — does not necessarily equal wealth. That is a point with both economic and political consequences. Let's look at it further.

Studies of census data by the Williams Institute at UCLA have shown that the old image of the LGBT community as an affluent one is a myth. In fact, LGB people, especially lesbian couples and their children, are at least as likely to be poor as their heterosexual counterparts. Same-sex parents, on average, have lower household incomes and rates of home ownership than opposite-sex ones. And an analysis by the New York Times last year showed that same-sex couples can end up paying tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars more in tax, legal, and health costs than their opposite-sex peers (though much depends on the specific incomes and circumstances of the individuals).

It is important to debunk the myth of LGBT affluence. As Lee Badgett, research director at the Williams Institute, said to the Orange County Blade in 2006, “The right wing uses this concept [LGBT affluence] to paint the image of the LGBT community as less sympathetic. . . . If they think a bunch of rich people are asking for rights — even if they’re reasonable rights — it makes us sound like whiners. And it sends a message that if we are so affluent, how can we say we’ve been victims of discrimination?” Indeed, one of the big questions throughout California's Prop 8 trial was the degree of political power gay people have. If a group has little power of its own, judges will apply a stricter level of scrutiny to laws that target the group.

Still, Bob Witeck, CEO of Witeck-Combs, noted in the press release about the buying-power study that there tend to be more LGBT households in major metro and suburban areas than elsewhere — and such households are generally associated with above-average income. Same-sex couples, especially men, are also more likely to have two partners in the workforce, and less likely to have children (despite a growing number of LGBT parents), which may give these couples a "slightly higher per capita household income."