Indeed, Chelsea, long a gay mecca, is now dominated more by upmarket art galleries, Google Inc.'s large New York office and other tech and media companies. 'We saw it with Chelsea, and the West Village before that.' 'Men feel safer moving into rough-and-ready neighborhoods and, because gay men are less likely to have children than lesbians, they tend to invest more in rapid property development,' he said about the attraction of Hell's Kitchen. DeFranceschi said he meets with prospective buyers weekly.Ī major part of Hell's Kitchen's brisk gentrification has been a boom in its gay male population, said Gary Gates, a demographer at the University of California at Los Angeles who wrote 'The Gay and Lesbian Atlas,' which analyses Census Bureau figures on same-sex couples. But the owners decided instead to raise the price to $5.3 million. DeFranceschi said he listed an empty lot measuring about 24 by 100 feet on West 45th Street for $4 million in 2011 and received a flurry of bids, including a cash offer at the full asking price. Interest in Hell's Kitchen is such that Mr.
