USA Today
October 6, 2014
USA Today covers the opening of our latest supportive housing development, Town Hall Apartments, the Chicago area’s 1st LGBTQ-friendly affordable senior housing development.
From USA Today:
CHICAGO — In his younger days, Ed Lund struggled to live openly as a gay man.
But as Lund, 69, enters his golden years, he has found a place where he is certain he will be comfortable. He’s among the charter residents moving into the newly opened Town Hall development in Chicago, one of the first affordable, LGBT-friendly housing communities for the elderly in the country.
“This feel likes home,” says Lund, who came out as a gay man during the AIDS epidemic and lost his job of 15 years in the early 1980s after his boss learned his sexual orientation. “As you get older, it just feels more comfortable to be around people who understand and share your background. It’s also nice not to have worry about letting something slip out.”
As lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people age, cities and LGBT advocates are grappling with how to deal with the needs of a generation that came out of the closet in more complicated times.
Perhaps the most sensitive issue for older gays and lesbians, particularly the poor, is housing discrimination. LGBT advocates also lament that the country’s elderly-care services haven’t evolved as quickly as the general population, which national polls show is increasingly accepting of gays and lesbians.
Communities are addressing the issue.With the opening of Town Hall, which had more than 400 applicants for 79 studio and one-bedroom apartments, Chicago became the third city in the USA since last year to open housing catering to low-income LGBT people.
Similar housing developments in Minneapolis and Philadelphia, both of which opened late last year, also received far more applicants than they could accommodate. Two more LGBT-friendly projects for low-income seniors are in the pipeline for San Francisco and Los Angeles, which opened the first such development in 2007.
Officials with the Center on Halsted and the Heartland Alliance, the two Chicago-based organizations that spearheaded the Town Hall project, say they are also exploring building another LGBT-friendly development in the region. The organizations screened applicants for Town Hall.
The push for LGBT-friendly housing comes as the gay rights movement has made huge strides.
Same-sex marriage advocates have racked up 20 victories in courts over the past two years. Twenty states and Washington, D.C., as well as more than 150 cities and counties across the USA, have laws prohibiting discrimination against LGBT individuals.
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