Openhouse's LGBTQ+ senior campus at 55–95 Laguna Street holds 121 affordable units — and both waitlists are full. As a 187-unit tower prepares to break ground on Market Street, San Francisco's 2026 budget cut the direct services that keep elders in place.

On a two-block stretch of Laguna Street, just off Market where the Castro shades into Hayes Valley, four buildings do quiet, specific work. At 55 and 95 Laguna sit 121 affordable apartments for LGBTQ+ seniors — 52 studios, 62 one-bedrooms, seven two-bedrooms, all restricted to low-income residents 55 and older. Between them, at 65 Laguna, is the Bob Ross LGBT Senior Center; at 75 Laguna, a community center. It is the largest campus of its kind in the country, run by the nonprofit Openhouse with Mercy Housing California managing the units. As of this summer, according to Openhouse, the waitlists at both buildings are full.

That fullness is the story of the corner. Openhouse says it served 3,764 people last year, and its own tally of the need keeps outrunning the doors. A 187-unit LGBTQ+ senior tower is funded and slated to break ground at 1939 Market Street late this year — 100% affordable, backed by $47.6 million in state Strategic Growth Council money — but it will not open until roughly 2029.

Meanwhile the services that let elders stay in the apartments they already have are thinning. San Francisco's 2026 budget, drawn against a $643 million deficit, eliminated funding for an Openhouse technology-literacy program that walked low-income queer and trans elders through the government forms behind housing, food aid and telehealth. It was one line in roughly $3 million of cuts to an 11-organization LGBTQ+ coalition that remained unrestored as of mid-June, per the coalition's own statement. "Technology is not a luxury — it is a lifeline," the group wrote.

The people this lands on are the ones without a fallback. Bay City News, in a piece by Valerie Conklin, profiled Connie Jeung-Mills — 71, a lesbian who has lived in San Francisco for decades, never married, no children, who realized during the pandemic that her closest friends were hours away. Many older LGBTQ+ residents share that arithmetic: no spouse, no kids, a chosen family that has scattered or died.

Walk the block tomorrow and nothing looks different — the flags from June's Pride parade, the senior center's glass doors, the apartments above. The change is in what happens behind them.