While the AI investment “boom” may be driving up market values, sustainable housing has to be rooted in local culture
Owen Dempsey, executive director of Quest House, moved to San Francisco from Massachusetts in 2019 to receive care from the organization after his own gender-affirming surgeries.
The 501(c)(3) nonprofit in San Francisco provides safe, temporary housing for trans men and transmasculine individuals to recover after phalloplasty or metoidioplasty– colloquially, “bottom” surgery. As renters, Quest House is vulnerable to lease cycles and property owner decisions. They are currently at a transition point searching for a new permanent home to avoid relocation.
At the time Dempsey had completed his surgeries, Quest House, which was run by another host, had to stop operations in 2020 largely due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Dempsey reflected on what he called were “subpar recoveries, alone,” after scrambling to figure out his post-operative recovery options. In 2023, Dempsey was able to reopen Quest House with other volunteers.
“I kind of realized through all the complications that I was having that I didn’t want to see anybody else go through this alone,” Dempsey said.
To secure Quest House’ current four-bedroom, three-bathroom house, the organization’s all-trans volunteer team had to use personal savings to provide several months of rent upfront. A house that size in San Francisco currently rents anywhere between $6,500 to $25,000 per month, according to listings on the real estate platform Zillow as of September 11.
And it’s not just locals from San Francisco who use Quest House’s services, Dempsey noted. Guests from 33 different states and three different countries have stayed there since the summer of 2024.
While Quest House provides temporary housing for recovery from specific medical procedures, the organization also connects members of a queer community to resources for permanent housing if they want to stay in San Francisco after their recovery. But for individuals with limited budgets, economic factors in the city are making this much more challenging.
On August 26, Zumper published its latest National Rent Report showing the median price for a one-bedroom rental rose to $4,300, a 25.7% increase since July 2025, making San Francisco,the second most-expensive housing market in the United States behind New York City.
On September 10, San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie declared a “rent emergency”. His announcement also included proposed legislation to help tenants stay housed and pledged legal defense for renters, as well as tenant counseling and education.
“We have lived through booms before — this time, we have an opportunity to build a recovery that is broad-based and lasting, where San Franciscans can put down roots and participate in our city’s success,” Lurie said at the press conference.
On August 3, the San Francisco’s Controller’s Office published a second quarter report showing rent prices on vacant apartments grew 14% between March and July of this year and prices for condos and single-family homes grew by double-digits. The report specifically attributed these increases in the city’s real estate market as “primarily driven by the AI investment boom.”
The state of California has some of the strongest legal protections in the United States for trans people. But even though many trans people flock to San Francisco for privacy, safety, community and life-affirming care, investors in artificial intelligence are driving up residential real estate prices due to industry investments totaling $1.6 trillion, according to Reuters.
Historic precedents for waves of migration
This is not the first time that San Francisco has experienced a wave of gentrification spurned by one major industry. The California gold rush in the late 1800s drew out prospective prospectors. Following the wealth of natural resources, immigrants came from the east and midwest United States, as well as from Europe directly into the city’s ports to build homes and businesses in the early 1900s.
During World War II, the city attracted people for a different reason, after thousands of gay and lesbian service personnel were dishonorably discharged for their sexual orientations. Many of them who came from rural areas in states like Ohio and South Dakota, found and built communities in San Francisco.
As a result of these new gay and lesbian residents, gayborhoods cropped up around Polk Street in the northeast end of the city. The Polk Gulch was San Francisco’s main gay neighborhood from the 1950s until the early 1980s. When white, middle class residents relocated to San Francisco’s suburbs in the 1970s, many LGBTQ people moved into the newly emptied Victorian houses for low rent or affordable down payments in Eureka Valley, an area which would become the Castro, and South of Market.
Harvey Milk, arguably the Castro’s most famous resident, opened and operated Castro Camera, a camera store in 1972 and throughout his tenure as the first openly gay man elected to public office in the city in 1977. Castro Camera became a hub for the LGBTQ community to gather without having to buy alcohol, and Milk had an official polling station for San Francisco elections.
South of Market, or SoMa, another area on the east end of the city, grew as a gay leather community – especially around Folsom Street. Leather culture developed in part from the subversion of the heteronormative masculine ideal of a soldier or law enforcement through their clothes, accessories, and attitude.
Bernal Heights was another neighborhood where lesbians moved in on the low rent and down payment for houses and businesses. Southeast of the Castro, the area was largely working-class and African-American. The corridor still thrives on the deep-rooted communities that lesbians have built or in bars like Wild Side West and El Rio.
The Tenderloin, or the Transgender District, remains a historic gayborhood that has proved hard to commercialize. The neighborhood’s residents are mostly working-class and people of color. An attempt by the city to revitalize the SoMa neighborhood in the 1960s pushed the gay community there into the Tenderloin.
The road ahead
According to the most recent data from the American Community Survey, the median individual income and home value was the lowest in the gayborhood zip codes compared to other areas in San Francisco. While LGBTQ San Franciscans built successful businesses and lifelong homes, the areas they settled down in have been historically disenfranchised and under-resourced.
But the LGBTQ community knows how to build. One organization empowering queer women to pick up tools and build is Dykes With Drills. The organization was founded by Julie Peri in 2018 in the Bay Area. The team has since expanded to New York, Chicago, New Orleans, and Central Arkansas.
In addition to tool workshops and beginner-friendly networking events, they’ve also built transitional housing together.
Together, Dykes With Drills have partnered with organization Youth Spirit Artworks to build ‘tiny homes’ for homeless or housing insecure youth in Oakland, and Habitat For Humanity in the Bay Area, Vermont, and Chicago.
The Dykes With Drills culture is “failure positive,” Peri said. While the organization doesn’t have the infrastructure to do large municipal builds, the grassroots nature of the homes they have built means the community knows their carpenters.
For queer care organizations like Quest House, funding comes from community donations, grant funding, and a sliding scale for guests. Quest House also partners with the Horizons Foundation for funding.
Quest House’s volunteer team has also been researching community-owned property models and land trusts to move away from being subject to the city’s increasingly hot rental market.
Dempsey said that if Quest House received more financial support, the organization could expand their services beyond transmasculine phalloplasty recovery to also accommodate post-operative care for trans femme folks and provide support for clients undergoing double mastectomy procedures, often known as top surgery.
“Housing instability disrupts the ecosystem of care in a queer chosen family,” Dempsey said.