| As canaries or early indicators, gays and lesbians have been linked to a number of urban trends including development, amenity growth, culture and tolerance. This dissertation examines the growing body of scholarship on the connection between gays and lesbians and a region's level of tolerance. In the first article, I examine the rise of Austin as a tolerant metropolis. Using a model of social movements, I present a case-study of how Austin became politically and socially tolerant of gays and lesbians. In the second article, I test this four-stage model (emergence, consolidation, expansion and assimilation) by clustering across central cities on four variables measuring political and social tolerance, concentration and location quotients. Initial results suggest that across United States central cities, urban gay and lesbian social movements can be classified using an outcome (political and social tolerance and residential dispersion) methodology. Just over half can be categorized as pre-emergence or emergence a third as consolidated and roughly 15% in the final two categories. The final article examines the spatial mismatch between the Creative Class and diversity as measured by gay households, bohemians, and foreign-born immigrants. Using a series of spatial measures, including the standardized spatial gini index, I show that the Creative Class may consume diversity, but in general, they tend to live in suburbs. Furthermore, concentration indices reveal that the Creative Class does not live in tracts considered diverse. Ideally, this research will inform development policy by providing a clearer understanding of how tolerance manifests and the relationship between 'diversity' and the Creative Class. |
