Remaking white residential segregation: metropolitan diversity and neighborhood change in the United States

ABSTRACT

From 1990 to 2010, white tracts fell from 82% to 70% of all metropolitan tracts.  This loss was concentrated among the most segregated white tracts – those with low diversity. White tracts that were moderately diverse actually doubled in number between 1990 and 2010 although this increase was insufficient to cancel the loss of low diversity white tracts. We model the effects of metropolitan characteristics on white-tract change by metropolitan area. Greater metropolitan-scale diversity increases the probability that low-diversity white tracts transition to moderate-diversity white. Moderately diverse white tracts, however, become more stable with increased diversity. A large metropolitan percentage of blacks or the foreign born reverses this stabilizing effect, increasing the probability that moderately diverse white tracts transition to non-white tracts.  Overall, the results suggest a reconfiguration rather than a dissolving of white dominated neighborhood space in response to increased metropolitan area diversity.

KEYWORDS:

• Neighborhood change
• segregation
• diversity
• gentrification
• whites

Acknowledgements

We thank the anonymous referees at Urban Geography for their valuable comments. All responsibility for the paper rests with the authors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Latinos were not identifiable in the Census until 1980 but Gratton and Gutmann (2000) estimate they were 3.2% of the US population in 1960. Because Latinos were most likely counted as White in 1960, we estimate the 1960 non-Latino white share by subtracting Gratton and Guttman’s Latino share estimate from 88.6%, the percentage white in the 1960 census.

2. Whites, blacks, Asians, and Latinos are the four largest racialized groups within the US. The US officially considers Latinos (Hispanics) to be an ethnic group and its members can identify as any race (e.g. white, black, Asian etc.). We follow the common practice of assigning all Latinos to a single racialized group and counting as white, black, Asian, Native American, and other (the five major race categories) only those who do not identify as Latino (Hispanic).

3. The 2010 percentage shares for the US as a whole and for metropolitan areas referred to in this paragraph are our calculations from the 2010 census.

4. Whites, of course, are not the only racial group who gentrify (Moore, 2009).

Additional information

Funding

The Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (Award 5R24HD042828) and a CompX Grant from the Neukom Institute at Dartmouth College supported this research.