Los Angeles and New York City, which have two of the largest LGBTQ populations in the country, are about to welcome two exciting new facilities geared at those communities.
In Los Angeles, not far from the iconic and soon-to-be-demolished Circus Disco gay club, the LGBT Center will build a new campus with 100 affordable housing units for seniors, up to 35 units of permanent supportive housing for youths and a large industrial kitchen and 100 beds for homeless young people, Curbed reports.
The future Anita May Rosenstein Campus will fold in medical services — and will be available to all, not just those who identify as LGBT.
The city’s LGBT Center is doing its second round of fundraising for the project and hopes to open the campus in early 2019. Take a look at the renderings for the project — they’re quite chic.
Never Miss a Beat
Subscribe to our newsletter to stay ahead of the latest LGBTQ+ political news and insights.
Meanwhile, in NYC, the Bronx Trans Collective, opening next month, will be “the city’s first major multi-service center dedicated specifically to transgender people, offering programs and services that were previously scattered across different sites,” the New York Times reports.
Reports the article: “The center will help transgender people get surgeries, hormone treatments, mental health counseling and assistance with legal name changes and job searches, among other services. It will also host regular support groups, youth counseling, meditation and yoga classes and cookouts on its back terrace.”
The city estimates that about 25,000 transgender people live there, many of them in the Bronx. Those folks say they often have to go all the way to downtown Manhattan to learn about services in their own borough, but now those services will be under one roof. The space is being donated free for a year by the building’s management, and various other LGBTQ groups throughout the city are chipping in other needs and expenses.
Several transgender groups are collaborating on the space.
“We all understand this is bigger than us,” said a leader of one of them, Sean Coleman. “There won’t be any fighting. We understand what’s at stake. How often do we get this opportunity?”