Out & About with Jim Frimmer, your Realtor in Mission Valley — Azalea Park: How gay SINKs and DINKs revitalized a neighborhood

Picture it: May 1980. Azalea Park, San Diego, California. Inflation is 14% and unemployment is 7½%, and that includes your wife who got a pink slip from the San Diego Unified School District just last week. Times are tough.

You are offered a great promotion at work, which comes just at the right time for you and your family. After long talks with your wife, you decide that you have to turn it down. Why? Because it means you would be doing a lot of traveling and that would leave your wife home alone during some days and nights.

The last thing you want to do is leave your wife alone in Azalea Park because of all the criminal activity, especially the drug dealers during the day and the prostitutes and gang hangouts during the night.

Fast forward to July 1993. Things are better, but the San Diego housing boom has gone bust, and it has hit Azalea Park hard. Coming up in just a week is the Nineteenth Annual Gay Pride Parade & Festival. You think about how Hillcrest, the heartbeat of gay San Diego, used to be just like Azalea Park until gays and lesbians moved in, cleaned it up, opened new businesses, and made it one of San Diego's great neighborhoods.

Why not Azalea Park? After all, it's not far from Hillcrest, and if you could get the interest of the SINKs and DINKs (single income, no kids; dual income, no kids), they would have the money to buy and the time to renovate, bringing beauty and new life to the neighborhood.

You get some friends together and decide to march in the Gay Pride Parade, and you do. Just a bunch of straight guys interested in their own neighborhood carrying home-made signs reading, "We love our gay neighbors" and "Gays welcomed."

You go home after the parade with a list of about 100 people interested in touring Azalea Park. Your efforts are picked up by CNN and broadcast nationwide. A few gay couples buy homes, and just as you suspected, they renovate them, landscape them, and take an interest in cleaning up Azalea Park to make it safe at all hours of the day.

Year after year, you, your old straight friends, and your new gay friends, enter a contingent in the Gay Pride Parade, and by 2003, more than 100 of the 800 households in Azalea Park are owned by gays and lesbians. They are keeping the streets and sidewalks clean; clearing brush and trash from the surrounding canyons; creating walking trails in those same canyons that used to be full of trash; renovating their homes with new roofs, exteriors, and landscaping; and taking an active interest in the community by hosting potlucks at the community park, hosting events in their own homes, and running for positions on the community home owner board.

Fast forward to 2010. The prostitutes are long gone, as are the gang hangouts. Homes have been renovated; landscaping is more than weeds; sidewalks are clean of beer bottles, condoms, and syringes; dogs bark; children play outdoors; potluck gatherings are common; and you might even find a white picket fence here and there.

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If you're looking for a great real estate agent in San Diego, well,
let me Google one for you.

I'm available 24/7, so feel free to contact me by phone or email.

Jim Frimmer, Realtor
Century 21 Award Mission Valley
California DRE License #01458572
619-729-5701
jimfrimmer@century21award.com
Mission Valley Condos Information

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Try RusselRayPhotos.com for inexpensive, royalty-free photos.

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