Behind the plywood that covers the entrance of the historic Castro Theatre, a major renovation is underway.
Berkeley-based Another Planet Entertainment, now the venue’s operator, has posted a notice asking the neighborhood’s forbearance (“please pardon our dust and noise”) and listing all the coming rewards: “much-needed” mural and plaster restoration, state-of-the-art heating and cooling, added bathroom capacity, and more.
Their message is obvious: Despite all the sturm und drang around the renovation – including removal of some historic seating — the big changes are for the better.
If there happened to be a sign overlooking the intersection of Market Street and Castro Street, a similar message from SF officials would be fitting. Big changes for the neighborhood are on the drawing board.
City planners have crafted a new housing map for San Francisco, and if the current version wins Board of Supervisors approval, it will open a path for taller buildings and more homes in many neighborhoods. Some of the most aggressive changes are slated along nearly one mile of Upper Market, from Castro to Octavia Boulevard.
Upper Market is the heart of gay San Francisco, with a Greater Castro frame of mind for all the gay-owned and -themed businesses and community spaces. Changes here both big and small – from the site of a former all-night diner to proposed substitutions for the neighborhood’s iconic Pride flag to the Castro Theatre renovation – can spark protest.
When it comes to housing, advocates on either side say they’re on the right side of LGBTQ history, and that their vision is best for SF’s queer future. Development skeptics say anything less than mostly affordable development won’t help.
“You can’t talk about queer or immigrant or any other historically marginalized culture without acknowledging that those cultures flourished in affordable working-class communities,” says bi SF-based tenant organizer Shanti Singh, who says the new housing plan is “at best agnostic to the presence of working-class people.”
Proponents point out that new housing, subsidized or not, increases availability – and homes for newcomers – and opposition to it often comes from established homeowners protecting their turf. Gay realtor Mark McHale, who’s lived and sold homes in the Castro for decades, uses an analogy about a neighborhood park where dogs are not allowed on the baseball diamond: “A lot of people have the attitude, ‘Oh, except for my dog, right?’”
Some Castro residents have the same attitude about housing, McHale says: New homes are a problem, but the ones they already live in are fine. Making a future for the neighborhood — even a gayborhood — means more homes and less exceptionalism, as he sees it: “We’ve got to face reality. More people are coming here, and we can’t act like it’s not happening.”
Taller and denser
San Francisco is redesigning itself. State regulators say the city for decades has not built enough new homes. Planners have responded by rewriting the zoning rules to allow taller buildings and more homes, especially in low-slung neighborhoods like the Sunset, Haight, and Richmond.
Easy access to public transit is another factor, and Upper Market has plenty. The draft plan, if approved, will double maximum heights to as much as 160 feet – about 15 stories high — at key intersections between Castro and Octavia.
Midblock buildings could also grow. Along Upper Market, the allowed height would go up to 120 feet. Along Castro’s most crowded block and in a few other spots, limits could rise from the current 40 feet to 85 feet. Buildings as tall as North Beach’s Sentinel Building could someday stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Cliff’s Variety or peer over the barhopping crowd at Castro and 18th.
Height limits in the rest of the neighborhood would stay the same, but density decontrol would take effect across the entirety of the Castro and Duboce Triangle, leaving homeowners and developers free to fit as many units into a lot as the building codes permit.
There’s no guarantee that a piece of land upzoned to allow eight, 10, or 15 story apartment buildings will eventually have them. But just a handful of new buildings could add thousands of new residents to Upper Market, which at last count had 23,000 people.
A denser neighborhood could mean more foot traffic for a small business community that has suffered the double whammy of online competition and the pandemic. The city has recorded more than 1,900 business closures in Castro/Upper Market since 2020, putting it in the top eight neighborhoods citywide.
“Isn’t more housing a good thing?” says Bethany Campbell, manager of the Underglass Framing Company on Market Street – named a legacy business in 2023.
“I can see why the city would want to increase heights on Market, as the main street in the city,” says Max Khusid, owner of the Art House SF gallery at Market and 16th Street, adding that he sympathizes with businesses that worry about displacement.
Those worries are real. There’s no protection for businesses against displacement by redevelopment, except for legacy businesses. Demolition of their buildings require a special permit thanks to a stopgap law that passed last year.
The planning department is considering new rules to give relocation assistance to displaced businesses. “Revitalizing a neighborhood is a good thing, but when you shut down businesses that’s a real problem,” says Ken Khoury, who with his brother runs a coffee roaster and a nail salon in the Castro Theatre building, one on either side of the entrance.
Another Planet says it needs their spaces for an expanded box office and isn’t renewing their leases. The theater has been the property of the Nasser family for a century. They hired APE in 2022 to renovate and run it.
The Khourys’ predicament isn’t related to the planned upzoning, but neighborhood reaction portends a lot of protest if redeveloped sites force out a lot of longtime merchants.
Vintage porn shop Auto Erotica at 18th and Castro was nearly another casualty of the neighborhood’s extended retail woes, but was saved four years ago by crowdfunding. Longtime owner Patrick Batt isn’t anxious about displacement: “I can’t imagine anyone actually tearing any of these buildings down.”
Love and acceptance, if you can afford it
For much of the 20th century, the Castro wasn’t the Castro. The neighborhood was Eureka Valley, and it was working-class Irish.
Then World War II “uprooted tens of millions of American men and women” and also marked “the beginning of […] San Francisco’s modern gay history,” writes John D’Emilio in Making Trouble: Essays on Gay History, Politics, and the University. Many gay servicemen found SF a welcoming environment compared to their hometowns and returned after the war.
There were other gay neighborhoods in SF before the Castro, but the California Migration Museum notes that a “general exodus” of Eureka Valley residents started in the ’60s, freeing up cheap housing.
“By 1973 there were over 800 [gay] organizations” in the city, and “gay bars grew from 58 in 1969 to 234 in 1980,” writes historian Chris Carlsson.
In popular mythology, a gay kid could get on a bus anywhere in America and come to SF to find love, acceptance, and community. The real history is more complicated, as women, people of color, and trans and genderqueer people were often excluded from the Castro scene. But for those who found their place, it could be a life-changing experience.
Former Eureka Valley Neighborhood Association president Alexis Levy wants the city, not private developers, to build homes, and the federal government to provide the billions of dollars required. Under Trump, that’s about as likely as Truth Social sponsoring Pride this year.
“The Castro developed the reputation as the bleeding edge of inclusivity because people from all over could afford to live here, but people don’t view it as that place anymore because there’s a cost of living problem,” says gay consultant Scotty Jacobs, who ran a third-place campaign for District 5 supervisor in 2024, emphasizing support for more development.
In the past decade, however, Upper Market has had 318 new homes. If supply-and-demand economics apply to housing, which YIMBYs believe and a growing body of research supports, more homes should put a brake on prices.
The SF real estate company Compass estimates that of 61 single-family homes sold in the neighborhood in the past 12 months, the median price was more than $2.6 million, or 44 percent higher than the citywide median price of $1.8 million.
“The big shift happened around 1996, when homes started to become more of an asset or investment,” says realtor McHale.
Castro lawyer and former Eureka Valley Neighborhood Association president Alexis Levy says “rezoning is never going to fix the affordability issue.” Levy instead wants the city, not private developers, to build and manage homes, with the federal government providing the billions upon billions of dollars required for a meaningful amount of affordable housing.
With the Trump administration, that’s about as likely as Truth Social sponsoring Pride this year. It’s much more likely under Trump that SF loses a huge amount of low-income housing funds.
Castro dilution?
Some people have worried for years that the Castro is, well, straightening out. But it’s hard to match data to those fears. Neither the city nor the US Census collect sexual orientation data. In a 2015 local retailers’ poll, 73 percent of Castro residents identified as queer, but the figure was lower – 55 percent – for recent arrivals.
Other estimates have put the citywide percentage somewhere above 10 percent. (For what it’s worth, the Castro is nearly 70 percent men, according to SF Planning, and the dating and hookup app Grindr last year ranked it as the “fourth gayest” U.S. neighborhood.)
Part of those erasure fears revolve around evictions, boosted by the 2022 news about legendary activist Cleve Jones leaving his longtime Castro flat after a long dispute with his landlord.
The Frisc has reported that new rules accompanying the housing map will make demolition difficult. SF also has some of the nation’s strongest renter protections, and evictions are relatively rare. But tenant advocates say the new upzoning plan will give landlords incentive to do so-called renovictions – protracted repairs designed to harass tenants out the door.
The worry about losing neighborhood identity extends to businesses. “There’s been a queer-owned bookstore of one kind or another in this exact spot since 1985,” says Alvin Orloff, owner of Fabulosa Books. Orloff understands the need for more housing but worries about the future of stores like his: “Queer tourism is big business for the city. When people come here, we need places for them that connect to queer history.”
Nationally, anti-LGBT rhetoric and hate crimes are on the rise again. And once again, San Francisco could be a place for young queer people from all over to find acceptance and be themselves. While they might not feel the same pull as there was 50 years ago to live in or near the Castro, the neighborhood’s affordability woes are writ larger across the city.
The same can be said for immigrants, of course. The city talks a big game about being welcome to people seeking more opportunities and a more tolerant atmosphere, whether they’re from another city, state, or country. But it’s much harder to escape to San Francisco when the median rent is more than $2,400 a month.