Building a “Family-Friendly” Metropolis

Abstract

This article explores the role normative sexuality played in housing policies in the San Francisco Bay Area after World War II. Beginning in the 1940s, policymakers made it easier for married Americans to acquire mortgages and excluded most people who deviated from sexual norms from the suburban housing market. Their efforts encouraged Americans to wed and pulled many middle-class married couples out of urban centers like San Francisco. During the 1960s, city leaders used federal funds to displace unmarried residents and to make urban areas competitive with the suburbs. Redevelopment, however, never reversed suburban growth, and the uneven nature of this process created two significant outcomes. First, suburbanization concentrated large numbers of unmarried people, including many gay men and lesbians, in places like San Francisco and facilitated the sexual revolution. Second, metropolitan expansion reinforced the notion that heterosexual norms were nearly universal by creating almost exclusive pockets of married people in the newest suburbs.