For Immediate Release
Feb. 26, 2004
Contacts: Claude S. Fischer, University of California, Berkeley, fischer1@uclink4.berkeley.edu, 510-644-0858; Rima Wilkes, University of British Columbia, wilkesr@interchange.ubc.ca, 604-822-6855; or John R. Logan, SUNY at Albany, j.logan@albany.edu, 518-442-4656.
Segregation in Cities and Suburbs — Old Trends and New (February 2004)
Black-white residential segregation declined modestly in recent decades. But a set of in-depth studies published in the February issue of the journal Demography identified both distinctive new trends and entrenched patterns. These include growth in distinctly black or white suburbs, "hypersegregated" metro areas despite rising incomes, and slowing of the pace of black-white desegregation. While racial segregation has decreased gradually, segregation by income levels has increased.
"Marble cake" instead of "donuts": The city-suburb distinction so important to residential segregation patterns in the 1960s and 1970s is waning in favor of distinctions among suburbs, report Claude Fischer, Gretchen Stockmayer, Jon Stiles and Michael Hout of the University of California, Berkeley. The old model of a predominantly black center city surrounded by the white suburban ring (dubbed the "white donut with black hole") is giving way to a new model resembling a marble cake or raisin bread.
"More blacks now live in suburbs but they are concentrated in specific suburbs," they write. "Differences among suburbs sharpened as towns have become more distinctly white or black."
Examining trends since the 1960s for all metropolitan areas, they found that the segregation of blacks from non-Hispanic whites decreased mainly because urban neighborhoods become somewhat more integrated.
"Segregation between specific neighborhoods has abated substantially since 1970, suggesting that personal, block-level resistance to integration has weakened or been overcome in the past generation," they write.
Segregation by income level also increased between 1970 and 2000 as the affluent clustered in specific metro areas and in wealthy suburbs within metro areas, they report. The unmarried increasingly congregated in urban areas, creating young adult neighborhoods in center cities.
Hypersegregation remains despite rising incomes: Researchers found that blacks continued to be significantly more segregated from whites than Hispanics, Native Americans, and Asians — even when taking into account income and other factors.
While income differences helped explain general patterns of segregation, they did not explain extremely high levels of black segregation found in some metropolitan areas, suggesting that discrimination continues to play an important role, report Rima Wilkes of the University of British Columbia and John Iceland of the University of Maryland.
They found that the larger the share of black population in a metro area, the more likely blacks were to be extremely segregated, lending support to the theory that whites are more likely to accept blacks when blacks constitute a smaller share of the population. They examined the extent of segregation using five measures; a metro area was considered hypersegregated when it scored high on at least four of the five measures. They found that blacks were hypersegregated from non-Hispanic whites in 29 metropolitan areas; Hispanics were hypersegregated from whites in 2 metropolitan areas; while Asians and Native Americans were not hypersegregated in any metro areas.
Hispanics were hypersegregated from non-Hispanic whites in the Los Angeles-Long Beach and New York metro areas, reflecting the "enormous growth in the Hispanic population over the past few decades and a large proportion of new immigrants settled in ethnic enclaves," they report.
Pace of black-white desegregation slower in 1990s than in previous decades: Rising minority incomes and the growth of multiethnic cities — factors that were expected to accelerate black-white desegregation — failed to have much effect in the largest metro areas with the largest minority populations, report John Logan, University of Albany, Brian Stults of the University of Florida and Reynolds Farley, University of Michigan.
They found that places with higher percentages of blacks remained more segregated and experienced smaller decreases in segregation between 1980 and 2000. Regional differences also remained: Black segregation declined the least in the Northeast and Midwest. Manufacturing centers experiences smaller declines in segregation and remained more segregated. Older regions remained more segregated, although the rate of change in these regions was similar to that in newer areas, they report.
Their findings provide evidence of "the persistence of patterns of segregation." They conclude that without sweeping, unforeseen changes, the rate of decline in black-white segregation is likely to remain modest — about 4-5 points per decade — bringing blacks to the level of integration Hispanics experience today by 2050.
Large shares of new immigrants and low incomes were linked to higher levels of segregation for Hispanics. Foreign-born Asians tended to be less segregated, underscoring the differences among minority groups.
See www.albany.edu/mumford/census for specific information about individual metro areas.
The research studies were supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the National Science Foundation, the Lewis Mumford Center, University at Albany, the Ford Foundation, and the Russell Sage Foundation.
The full articles, titled "Hypersegregation in the Twenty-First Century" (Wilkes and Iceland); "Distinguishing the Geographic Levels and Social Dimensions of U.S. Metropolitan Segregation, 1960-2000" (Fischer, Stockmayer, Stiles, and Hout); and "Segregation of Minorities in the Metropolis: Two Decades of Change" (Logan, Stults, and Farley) are available on www.prb.org/cpipr. Or call the Center for Public Information on Population Research, 202-939-5414. The Center, a project of the Population Reference Bureau, is funded by the National Institute on Child Health and Human Development.