Are you gay?

I’m currently carrying out a small research project funded by the British Academy on the experience of homelessness among young people who identify as LGBT+, and people who identify as LGBT+ and live in the most deprived neighbourhoods in Scotland. You can read more about the project here, and it emerged from the research I blogged about here and set out the agenda for my current research, challenging narrative of gentrification, here.

We have employed a research assistant to interview people who identify as LGBT+ and I am interviewing people who work with housing associations, local authorities and homelessness organisations. All these organisations, and people, have been amazingly committed to advancing equality and really wanted to learn from my research, as well as providing some excellent examples of good practice.

A few of these organisations have been very open in admitting they don’t routinely collect data on the sexual or gender identity of people, beyond the simple male/female monitoring. They’ve also said it is something they were going to start doing soon. One participant suggested that they didn't do this recording historically because in Scotland (and I’d add, probably the whole UK) this was probably because people feel awkward about asking about sexuality, and being asked about it.

Now, what I’m about to explain I’m sure millions of people have argued (indeed the wonderful folk at LGBT Youth Scotland who are helping me with this research point this out) and I’d welcome academic references to this point, but…I dwelt on this for a while and it’s really fucking heteronormative to not routinely ask service users about their sexual orientation because of a feeling of discomfort.

Because, you see, the 95% of you reading this who identify as heterosexual never have to explain your sexual identity because everyone presumes you are straight. You feel awkward being asked about who you have a sexual relationship with because you have never had to justify it. Every time I, or anyone else who identifies as LGB, has to answer that question we are coming out to a stranger. We don’t know how you would react. Actually, it usually makes me feel more comfortable. Yet organisations choose not to ask this question for fear of making people feel uncomfortable, or insulting people; straight people who really don’t have to worry about this at all.

Why does this matter? Before I get to that, it’s important to note that it is very difficult to ask a good question about what someone’s sexual identity is. Technically, in a survey, you should ask three questions: what sexual identity someone identifies with; who they usually form romantic relationships with; and who they have sex with. In the UK the NATSAL is the only survey that manages to do that. However, the social scientists at the Scottish Government and Office for National Statistics found that something along the lines of “How would you describe your sexual identity” with the choices “Gay/Lesbian”, “Bisexual”, “Straight/heterosexual” and “Prefer not to answer” does a good enough job. The same applies around asking people about their gender identity, or what pronouns they prefer. And, as Katherine Brown argues in this book chapter, despite the fact such survey questions impose identities on people, it’s better to know something about this population than nothing.

And this is why it matters. This is why people need to get over their straight, heteronormative cringe with asking people about their sexuality and sexual identity because then you can do something about it. To give a housing example, a tenant might report anti-social behaviour and abuse. This might be a homophobic or transphobic hate crime. As a body, you have a duty under the Equality Act (2010) to prevent harassment and discrimination, so your staff should be trained to help tenants report a hate crime. If you had never asked your tenants if they were LGBT+ identifying then your tenants might not feel comfortable in explaining that it was a homophobic or transphobic hate crime. On a more mundane level, partners who live in a socially-rented home in Scotland can be added onto tenancies so they have succession rights. It wouldn’t surprise me if many LGB identifying tenants might not think this would apply to their partners. Again, asking tenants their sexual and gender identity when they move in would make them feel comfortable – they would know you wanted to know – and so they would be happier to add new partners to tenancies.

So, are you gay? A simple question, but one we’re still not asking enough. 

Book reviews - Incomplete Streets: Processes, Practices, and Possibilities

Inspired by Paul Cairney, I thought I'd start making my book reviews more widely available. So first off this one, which I did for Town Planning Review.

Title	Incomplete Streets: Processes, Practices, and Possibilities Routledge Equity, Justice and the Sustainable City series
Editors	Stephen Zavestoski, Julian Agyeman
Publisher	Routledge, 2014
ISBN	1317930983, 9781317930983
Length	346 pages

I live in a slowly gentrifying neighbourhood of Edinburgh, Scotland – of the sort that typifies many of the case studies in this book (Doucet 2009). The main road to the city centre from the neighbourhood is currently being upgraded and there was a local campaign to get it redesigned in what this book, and readers based in North America, would call “complete streets” style – wide pavements, segregated cycle lanes and vastly reduced space for vehicular traffic, with speeds reduced to 20mph. The battle was lost, and non-segregated, advisory cycle lanes were installed which are now predominantly used a car-parking places for businesses on the road. Meanwhile, in the more affluent south of the city, an extensive segregated network of cycle paths is emerging. In the suburban south-west of the city, a non-affluent community I work with extensively have poor quality public realm and a streetscape designed in the 1960s which is hostile to pedestrians and cyclists.

This collection of essays edited by Stephen Zavestoski and Julian Agyeman illuminates these issues of equity and road infrastructure design in fascinating detail. The book focuses on the “complete streets” movement (living streets in the UK; standard road design in the Netherlands and Denmark) highlighting through various critical approaches that in societies with high levels of socio-economic inequality ‘when implemented incrementally, Complete Streets will inevitably benefit certain people in certain urban spaces and not others’ (p.7). The book is broken into three sections: processes, practices and possibilities.

The processes section essentially takes us through stories to tell us “where are we now?”, starting off with Peter Norton’s beguiling chapter on the role of the motor industry PR in the US in forming motor-vehicle oriented road design standards, a theme developed further by Aaron Golub. The chapters by Chronopolous and Lee then critically engage with the intersection of sustainability policies – such as complete streets design and congestion charging – and various policies that could be labelled “neoliberal”. Chronopolous, in particular highlights how congestion charging is a regressive tax. The section ends with Mehta using an evocative description of street life in India to describe what a complete street might be like if it was truly inclusive.

The sections on practices and possibilities were less clearly delineated in terms of content. They were mainly case-studies of various cities in the US and how they have implemented various Complete Streets policies, or related policies such as pavement/sidewalk food vending, or community stewardship schemes. Particular highlights in these last two sections were Langegger’s account of the racially-driven removal of Hispanic “lowriders” from the streets of Denver; and Vallianatos' account of the illegal street vendors making the sidewalks of Los Angeles their space.

However, in their introduction Zavestoski and Agyeman rhetorically suggest that ‘this volume initiates the kind of dialogue and future research that can help answer these questions’ – and the trouble, as they allude to in their conclusion, is that many of the chapters signally do not answer questions. Over many of the chapters the bogeyman of gentrification looms large – essentially (and the evidence presented in the volume is compelling in this regard) complete streets as an urban design practice in the USA goes hand-in-hand with gentrification and the displacement of poor People of Color by richer white hipsters on fixed-gear bikes.

I find this troubling, because it leaves the planner with a Hobson’s choice – design safe streets and create a tidal wave of gentrification; or leave things as a status-quo. As a researcher interested in delivering socially just urban renewal I find this troubling – do less affluent communities have to stay in neighbourhoods with poor quality public-realm that endangers their safety and their health just in case improving them leads to some displacement? Obviously, the answer is no; we can do things such as ensure levels of affordable rented housing remain high; but that the logic of their argument ends at this point does not seem to have been fully grappled by many of the authors.

The chapters that get nearest to this are Cadji and Hope Alkon in their chapter on North Oakland farmers market and Goodling and Herrington writing about the Portland Community Watershed Program. Both these chapters offer fascinating accounts of community organisers and workers wrestling with the challenges of trying to deliver environmental equity without exacerbating socio-economic injustice through their work. A frustratingly short chapter was that by Chapple – this highlights that in the US context Complete Streets policies are regressive because most lower-skilled, lower-paid workers have to drive to their suburban work locations. This is an argument and issue that could have been explored in much greater depth throughout the book.

A major weakness of the book was its parochial focus on the USA and this weakened the argument overall. An engagement with practice from northern European countries, particularly Denmark and the Netherlands could have offered real opportunities to learn how to deliver environmentally sustainable street design without exacerbating socio-economic injustices. Parallels could also have been made with UK practice which seems to be following the US trend.

This notwithstanding, I would recommend this book be read by anyone involved in urban design, transport planning and cycling advocacy – it raises thorny issues and questions that stick with you a long time. I wish traffic engineers would read it to realise their engineering solutions have social impacts. As a cycling advocate myself, it has made me rethink what my priorities are for the city in which I live as it expands its provision for active travel.

Doucet, B. (2009). "Living through gentrification: subjective experiences of local, non-gentrifying residents in Leith, Edinburgh." Journal of Housing and the Built Environment 24(3): 299-315.

Queer-ying gentrification

18 months ago my colleague Dr Kirsten Besemer blogged on here about a surprise finding from some work we had done for the EHRC in Scotland – that a disproportionate number of non-heterosexual people lived in the most deprived neighbourhoods in Scotland. We’ve since written this up as a journal article now published in Housing Theory and Society.

In writing up the paper we set the findings in the broader gentrification literature. As Kirsten wrote about back in 2012, this was because the narrative of LGBT households as gentrification pioneers is dominant. Growing up, one of the formative events in my emerging sexuality was watching the Channel 4 drama Queer as Folk. Aiden Gillen’s character Stuart typified this narrative – he lived in a swanky loft apartment in central Manchester, in a rapidly gentrifying neighbourhood, paid for through his successful career, despite the homophobia he had experienced in his life. Similarly, in a lot of American scholarship on the creative class, LGBT households are synonymous with the creative class. If you’re a gay man, you’re rich and live in a loft apartment.

Reading through the literature on gentrification and LGBT residential location choice that I did for this paper, it was surprising how much this narrative has not been troubled – even though Loretta Lees in this article from 2000(£) argued that gentrification scholarship needed a much greater focus on issues of gender, ethnicity and sexual identity as well as class. Apologies if I did miss out on particular literature, but the stuff that came up in my literature search was predominantly accepting of the gay gentrification narrative.

There are two issues with this. Firstly, it does smack of a growing heteronormativity that has been particularly noticeable in the debates around equal marriage. Gay men are now just seen as men, in fact they’re almost seen as uber-men as they aren’t burdened with childcare, and just want to settle down with their husband in a very tastefully decorated house. This ignores the “little things” that Panti Bliss talks so evocatively about that frame how non-heterosexual people experience the world. Yes, we have seen the declining significance of homophobia in our society, but as a non-heterosexual you still find yourself censoring your behaviour; or feel that lump of fear in your throat when you reveal the gender of your partner to a relative stranger. To presume that non-straight households are always gentrification pioneers, or increasingly second-wave gentrifiers, is to ignore diversity within the non-straight population, and impose a heteronormativity upon non-heterosexual people. If data on sexual orientation at a neighbourhood level is available for other countries, I would strongly encourage others to repeat our analysis to see if this is a Scottish phenomenon, or a broader one.

The second issue is one of the policy implications of recognising that the lives of non-heterosexual people might be difficult and therefore they find themselves living in socially-rented housing in deprived neighbourhoods. As we stated in our original Hard to Reach report it is all too easy to presume Scotland’s deprived neighbourhoods are homogenous, white, heterosexual working class areas. We have shown they are not. Our finding might be a geographic fluke because the non-heterosexual population is so small, although tests of statistical significance show it is not. That this non-straight population living in deprived neighbourhoods in Scotland is comparatively older, does give credence to the description an older LGBT-identifying friend described, of lots of older non-straight people who had pretty difficult lives, living in social housing in the west of Scotland. If we accept this, then we need to consider whether services for non-heterosexual people need to move out of inner-city locations, or that mainstream services in deprived neighbourhoods need greater skills and training around helping a non-heterosexual population that might have multiple problems.