As the cost of housing continues to soar in California and elsewhere, an increasing number of young people have become homeless, according to the Pew Charitable Trusts. Among those homeless, one group has it especially tough: Young people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender.

“There’s a myth of San Francisco as the ‘gay mecca,’” said Jodi Schwartz, executive director of Lyric, a nonprofit community center in San Francisco that serves LGBT youth. “It can be. But just for some.”

The reality, she said, is that many LGBT young people end up on the street or in unstable housing. Many are there because they’ve been rejected by their parents, peers or society in general due to their sexual orientation or gender identity.

One measure of how many are affected comes from Lyric. Of the 600 mostly LGBT young people enrolled in Lyric’s programs in San Francisco, 56 percent are homeless or have unstable housing situations and all are low-income.

LGBT young people ages 13 to 25 are 120 percent more likely to become homeless than their straight peers, according to a national survey of 26,000 young people released in November by Chapin Hall, a University of Chicago research and policy center. And of the nation’s 1.6 million youth 18 and younger who were homeless at some point last year, 40 percent were LGBT, even though they represent only 7 percent of that youth population overall, according to True Colors Fund, a New York nonprofit that advocates on behalf of homeless LGBT youth.