Which New York City borough has the highest percentage same-sex families with children? Those who know a bit about New York’s LGBT population might guess Manhattan, with traditional gay meccas Greenwich Village and Chelsea, or Brooklyn, with lesbian-filled Park Slope. According to a new report by the Williams Institute at UCLA, however, forty-nine percent of same-sex couples in the Bronx have children, more than any other borough.
The New York Times covered this in a lengthy article yesterday, relating that Manhattan has the most same-sex couples overall, 38 percent of the city total, but only 4 percent of them have children. In Brooklyn, 21 percent of same-sex couples are parents, in Queens, 22 percent, and on Staten Island, 29 percent.
Demographer Gary J. Gates, a senior research fellow at the Williams Institute, said the borough’s high percentage of Black and Hispanic residents may account for the high rate of parenthood among same-sex couples there: “nationally, black and Hispanic same-sex couples are two to three times more likely to have children than white same-sex couples.”
The Bronx is also relatively affordable, which may help attract all kinds of families with children. Gates said that the Bronx is one of the few places in the country “where the percent of same-sex couples raising children is virtually the same as different-sex couples raising children.”
The New York Times reports, though, that “there are fewer support services, and more harassment, in the Bronx than elsewhere.” The most interesting parts of the article are not the demographics, but the profiles of actual same-sex parents, dealing with prejudice and making slow progress towards greater acceptance, one neighbor at a time, in a neighborhood one wouldn’t expect.
Worth a read.
This was a big surprise to me, and I live there!
I guess it is also surprising to many people that the Bronx is indeed great for kids. But two of the biggest parks in NYC are here, plus a huge zoo, the Nobel laureate-producing public Bronx High School of Science, and a mix of people from all over the world.
My particular neighborhood, Riverdale, is very welcoming, even though there are not a lot of us (we know only one other 2-mom family in the area so far). There are no primarily gay shops or bars, but there are at least 2 gay-friendly Irish pubs within a 10-minute walk. (Our favorite is kid-friendly too: there’s no TV, but there’s live acoustic music and a toy box!) There are also several queer-friendly religious congregations and an Ethical Culture Society nearby, so not all the religious influence is bad.
Some other areas of the Bronx I would not consider very safe, but I’m glad to see that change is happening, although slowly.