Mixed Race Studies

Neighborhood Segregation in Single-Race and Multirace America: A Census 2000 Study of Cities and Metropolitan Areas

Fannie Mae Foundation
2002
45 pages

William H. Frey
University of Michigan and the Milken Institute

Dowell Myers
University of Southern California

This report accompanies the release of detailed racial segregation indices for 1,246 individual U.S. cities with populations exceeding 25,000 and for the 318 U.S. metropolitan areas. These data can be accessed from the World Wide Web at www.CensusScope.org. This study extends earlier work on racial segregation from Census 2000 in the following respects:

• It examines segregation patterns for persons who identify themselves as one race alone as distinct from those who identify themselves as two or more races, which is possible for the first time in Census 2000.
• Its focus on large and small cities as well as metropolitan areas provides a comprehensive assessment of segregation variation across local areas and broader metropolitan regions.
• Segregation and exposure measures in this study are based on the block group unit (average population 1,100), which more closely approximates a neighborhood community area than the census tract unit (average population 5,000) used in other studies. This more refined block group–based segregation measure permits the detection of segregation patterns for small racial groups or in small areas that are camouflaged when tract-based segregation measures are used.

The opportunity to look at segregation for single-race and multirace groups with Census 2000 provides an important means of assessing the prospects of future integration in a multirace society where intermarriage and interrace identification are on the rise. Our analysis of singlerace and multirace segregation shows that:

• Persons who identify themselves as “white and black” live, on average, in neighborhoods that more closely approximate the racial composition of the average white person’s neighborhood, rather than that of the average black person’s neighborhood. For the combined metropolitan population of the United States, the average neighborhood of a “white and black” resident is 61 percent white and 19 percent black. The average neighborhood of someone who identifies as black alone is 29 percent white and 54 percent black, and the average neighborhood of someone who identifies as white alone is 81 percent white and 6 percent black.
• Among the cities and metropolitan areas in our study, persons identifying with two or more races showed, on average, less segregation from whites than did minority persons identifying with a single race.

Our analysis of cities with more than 25,000 population shows the wide variation in segregation levels for each race and ethnic group. For most race groups, the highest levels of segregation tend to occur in the nation’s largest cities. For example, the City of New York ranks in the top six of all cities for each minority group’s segregation from whites. It ranks third in segregation for blacks, fifth for Hispanics, first for American Indians, first for Hawaiians, and sixth for those who identify themselves as two or more races. Hence, studies that focus only on segregation in large cities or in cities that have the largest minority populations overstate the level of racial segregation that exits in most cities with a minority presence. Other findings are:

• Among cities with more than 100,000 population, white-black segregation ranges from an index of dissimilarity of 21 (Chandler, AZ) to 87 (Chicago, IL); Asian segregation from whites ranges from 15 (Coral Springs, FL) to 66 (New Orleans, LA); and Hispanic segregation from whites ranges from 17 (Hialeah, FL) to 71 (Oakland, CA).
• The lowest segregation from whites for each race group tends to be associated with cities with less than 100,000 population, located in the suburbs, and, largely, in California, Texas, and other “multiethnic” states in the Sunbelt. Lowest city segregation indices for each race are in: The Colony, TX (white-black index of 8); Morgan Hill, CA (white-Asian segregation index of 9); Copperas Cove, TX (white-Hispanic segregation index of 8); Moore, OK (white–American Indian index of 12); Carson, CA (white-Hawaiian index of 25); and Cerritos, CA (white–multiple race index of 7).

City segregation indices differ from metropolitan segregation indices because the former reflect local patterns that can vary within the same metropolitan unit. Our analyses of dissimilarity of both levels indicate that:

• On average, segregation levels are higher for metropolitan areas than for cities. Among the cities in our study, the average segregation levels for blacks, Asians, and Hispanics are indices of 45, 32, and 35 respectively. Average segregation levels among metropolitan areas for these three groups are indices of 59, 45, and 43, respectively.
• Among smaller racial categories, Hawaiians show the highest average segregation levels, with an index of 53 for cities and 61 for metropolitan areas. Persons identifying themselves as two or more races show the lowest average segregation levels: an index of 27 for cities and 33 for metropolitan areas. American Indian segregation levels lie inbetween, with an average index of 39 for cities and 43 for metropolitan areas.
• Different cities within the same metropolitan area can have quite different segregation measures. For example, although the Detroit primary metropolitan statistical area ranks second among all areas on white-black metropolitan segregation (index of 87), the city of Detroit ranks 55th, with an index of 63, among cities of more than 100,000 population. On the other hand, metropolitan Atlanta ranks 53rd in white-black segregation with a metropolitan wide dissimilarity index of 69, whereas the city of Atlanta ranks fourth in segregation, with an index of 83, among cities of more than 100,000 population. This shows that the metropolitan segregation index does not easily translate into segregation levels of large or small cities within the metropolitan area.

Finally, our use of the block group as a proxy for neighborhood in this segregation study provides a more refined measure that reveals segregation across smaller neighborhoods, rather than the larger census tract measures that have been used in some earlier studies. Block group–based segregation tends to be greater in smaller cities and metropolitan areas or where the minority population is small.

• On average, the white-black dissimilarity index is 5.8 points higher when block groups, rather than tracts, are used to measure segregation. The disparity is greatest in smaller metropolitan areas. For example, in metropolitan Reno, NV, white-black segregation measured on the basis of block groups has an index of 44, whereas the counterpart segregation index measured on the basis of census tracts is only 34.
• Indices of neighborhood exposure to other races are also affected by the choice of block group or tract as the neighborhood measure. For example, in metropolitan Jamestown, NY, the average black person lives in a neighborhood that is 69 percent white when the neighborhood is measured on the basis of block groups. However, that percentage rises to 81 percent white if the larger census tract is considered to be the neighborhood..

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