By Judayah Murray | October 19, 2018

We finally found the end of the rainbow–and it wasn’t in the gayborhoods of Lower Manhattan. Evidently, it’s in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, where New York City has made plans to open the Ingersoll Senior Residences. It will be the city’s first ever affordable housing specifically designed for LGBT elders. Despite Manhattan harboring a majority of the LGBT-friendly resources and centers, Brooklyn still seems like a very promising choice for a project of this sort over places like Chelsea and Greenwich Village–areas with a higher gay population.

One of the biggest reasons for that is its affordability.

Brooklyn, especially Fort Greene, is in dire need of affordable housing across the board as the effects of gentrification skyrockets housing property. It was listed as one of the main problems in 2018 that Brooklyn Community District 2 is looking to fix in the upcoming years. The district even installed a lottery system in 2015 for residents to apply to win better rent deals. But as expensive as Fort Greene gets, it has nothing on Manhattan.

Curbed.com, a subsidiary of Vox Media that focuses on city housing, lists the average price of a one-bedroom apartment in Fort Greene as $2700, but in Greenwich Village and Chelsea it’s $3500-3700.

“It’s like a Little Manhattan out there,” says Jermaine Jackson waving his hand toward Flatbush Avenue Ext, a heavily commercialized area bordering Fort Greene Park, “Everybody should have affordable housing, it’s getting hard out here. If you make $1000 a week and can’t pay $3000 a month for rent, how are you living?”

Jackson, a Fort Greene resident, mentions a program already in existence called DRIE, Disability Rent Increase Exemption. He says it froze and helped pay half of his mother’s rent before she passed away recently. There’s also a Senior Citizen edition to this program called SCRIE which can be extremely beneficial if you’re 62 years old, receiving Federal Disability Assistance, making $50,000 or less per year, already living in a rent regulated apartment, and spending more than a third of your income on your rent. It becomes a bit more complicated when you’re also trans and the only apartments that qualify are in buildings with highly transphobic neighbors.

Sociologists use a term called ‘homophily’ to describe the basic human tendency to want to be around people who share similar characteristics. Amin Ghaziani, the author of the scholarly journal Goodbye Gayborhood?, suggests that homophily makes that case for building an LGBT-specific housing unit.

“The LGBT elders today came of age in a world that was very different than the present circumstances in which our LGBT youth come out,” he says, “Research shows that many LGBT elders who enter housing units are often forced back into the closet due to lingering homophobia among members of their cohort. Affordable housing for LGBT seniors provides a much-needed safe space for them to enjoy their golden years.”

“13 percent of LGBT seniors had been discriminated against on the basis of sexual orientation when searching for housing,” that research was reported by Services and Advocacy for LGBT Elders, SAGE, in 2016.

But Fort Greene in 2018 seems more promising, according to Lynn Faria the Chief Officer of External Affairs for SAGE.

“Fort Greene has long been a neighborhood favored by the LGBT community, especially LGBT people of color,” she says, “That’s reflected in the number of LGBT organizations in the neighborhood. Organizations like the Rainbow Heights Club, Audre Lorde Project, and Gay Men of African Descent and SAGE’s own senior center run with GRIOT Circle are already in the area. Ingersoll Senior Residences will add to the equation, and bring LGBT elders to the front.”

Floyd Rumohr, a white, gay male in his fifties passionately explaining why he thought the opening of this kind of housing to be so important to the community.

“As an older person, I think it’s important to be around people that love and support you,” says Floyd Rumohr who disclosed his homosexuality, “Many of these people have seen their friends die during the AIDs crisis, or beaten. And I want to be clear. I hate that word ‘tolerate’. I ‘tolerate’ the fly buzzing around my ear. I don’t want to be tolerated. People need to be loved, supported and celebrated.”

To address the general need for affordable housing in Brooklyn, these new units won’t just be available for members of the LGBT community. Cis-hetero LGBT-respecting neighbors will also be welcome to cohabitate. And the current neighborhood residents seem pretty upbeat about that.

“We’re all human beings,” Esther Thomas, 72, says, “As long as they’re not drug addicts, I don’t see why they shouldn’t live here.”