When Ellen Leonard moved to San Francisco in 1984, it wasn’t unusual to see young men on Castro Street using wheelchairs or walkers. People were dying, and the Reagan administration seemed unconcerned about the gay community.
“Nobody was taking care of us,” says Leonard, standing in her house on Caselli Street with a view of the Castro Theatre and Market Street’s 20-by-30-foot Pride flag.
Back then, neighbors forged new ways to help each other, delivering meals, creating local newspapers, and opening special clinics to serve people with AIDS.
More than 40 years later, Leonard still thinks like that. She’s 73 years old and the owner of a mostly empty two-story Edwardian-style house, plus a cottage in the backyard where she resides part of the time. Lately, she’s been spending more time in her other home, a senior living facility in Sonoma County. Her dream is to eventually give her San Francisco property — now worth more than $2 million, according to Zillow — to the next LGBTQ generation.
But she’s not sure how. Legally, It’s much easier to give a property to a specific person than a broadly defined demographic.
In a city with sky-high housing prices, inheriting a property is arguably a middle-income San Franciscan’s only pathway to home ownership. It’s part of the reason why some North Beach homes remain Italian-American owned, or how the Mission continues its legacy as a Latino cultural hub, with family buildings passing down to the next generation.
The Castro is different. Many aging LGBTQ adults or couples don’t have kids, and for those who do, their children might not be gay. After the Castro became a gay mecca in the 1970s, residents started to worry that the neighborhood was losing its character, a fear that continues to this day and animates both sides of the debate over new neighborhood housing.
Leonard, who moved into her Castro home in 1992, says there are more straight people now. Neither the U.S. Census nor San Francisco collect sexual orientation data, so it’s hard to prove.
An idea with momentum
Leonard doesn’t want kids and doesn’t wish she had them. “I’m not trying to replicate what people do with transferred wealth to the next generation,” she says. Of course, straight people choose not to have kids all the time, but this is different. She said she wants something designed “for the queer community.”
One option is to turn her property into a land trust, where a nonprofit becomes the owner and typically rents or sells it to the tenants.
For years it’s been an idea on SF’s real estate fringes, but it gained some momentum when the nonprofit San Francisco Community Land Trust received a $20 million donation from Jeff Bezos’s ex-wife Mackenzie Scott in 2023. The SFCLT has bought 17 properties in all, renting them to residents at risk of eviction. In some cases, they’ve helped tenants get an ownership stake in the property.
A former lawyer, Leonard is excited about the intellectual challenge of the project and is willing to take the time — even years — to make it happen.
The SFCLT would “absolutely be interested” in helping Leonard plan for her home, says its policy director Kyle Smeallie. “A lot of our properties are in the four to six unit range. That’s where we see a lot of displacements, and our mission is to stop displacement.”
Leonard is open to working with the group but says she’s exploring other options too.
A friend connected her to Jesse Oliver Sanford, and they immediately bonded over their shared interest in Buddhism and queer living alternatives. In 2017, Sanford tried to create a “Queer Land Trust” to protect LGBTQ tenants from eviction, including those in the co-op where he lives and hosts community events. But the trust never raised enough money to be viable, says Sanford.
As we climb up and down the stairs of her multi-unit house, Leonard never tires. “I’m healthy,” she says. A former lawyer, she’s excited about the intellectual challenge of the project and is willing to take the time — even years — to make it happen.
But there is urgency at the city level. San Francisco is falling short of state requirements and its own promises to make room for tens of thousands of new housing units, both market-rate and affordable. Part of meeting that goal means acquiring apartment buildings, turning them into affordable housing, and leveraging “underutilized and vacant” sites.
Woodshop and art
‘Underutilized’ is a fair way to describe Leonard’s property. She lives in the backyard cottage part-time and rents out the first floor of the main house. But the top apartment, with four small rooms and a large hallway, is mostly empty. (She uses one bedroom for guests and another at times as office space.) To be fully habitable it would need renovations, especially the kitchen.
It might once have been subject to SF’s 2022 vacant home tax, authored by progressive former Sup. Dean Preston — SFCLT’s Smeallie was his chief of staff — but a local judge found the ordinance illegal in 2024.
Leonard says she’s aware of the city’s affordability problem and committed to keeping the Castro a welcoming place for LGBTQ people. A developer trying to maximize profit would almost certainly offer Leonard the fastest, easiest way to turn her house into a home for future generations, but as Leonard tours me through the empty apartment, it’s clear that she has other motives.
Her late partner’s art is still hanging on the walls and tucked into drawers in the guest room. On the first floor of her backyard cottage is a woodshop that Leonard hopes a future tenant will cherish just as much as she does.
I can relate. When I sold my childhood home after my parents died, I wanted to know the family who bought it, to bring them a housewarming gift, to get one last glimpse of the kitchen. But everyone advised me against it. It’s a business transaction, they said. I never did meet the new tenants, but once a year, I drive by their house.
Before I leave Leonard’s house, she hands me a novel her late partner wrote. In the story, set in the Castro, their backyard cottage is described in detail and is home to a gay couple, one of whom dies of complications from AIDS. Leonard says that actually happened, although it was their next-door neighbor who died just after they moved in.
Later, she tells me about the property owner before her, a gay man who seemed more interested in finding the right buyer than in making the biggest profit. He’s also the basis for a character in the book.
The house, she says, is his legacy too.
