Despite skewing Democrat, LGBT people are flocking to red states. It’s a sign that cities in the center of the country are becoming more accepting but it’s also an indication that traditional LGBT safe havens are prohibitively expensive.
ConsumerAffairs.com analyzed U.S. Census data and Gallup polling information to model the movement of the LGBT community from 1990 to 2014. The overall trend is striking. In 1990, the LGBT population was concentrated in coastal metropolitan areas and other safe havens—cities like San Francisco, New York, Seattle, and Atlanta. By 2014, LGBT hot spots cropped up in some seemingly unlikely places: Salt Lake City, Louisville, Norfolk, Indianapolis, and other red state cities.
The ConsumerAffairs analysis ranks each city based on the percentage of its residents who identified as LGBT in each year. In 1990, for example, only one percent of the Salt Lake population identified as LGBT, giving the city a ranking of 39. By 2014, nearly 5 percent of Salt Lake City’s population was LGBT and the city was ranked 7th overall.