Chicago vs. Dallas: Why is the North behind the South and West in Racial Integration?
US metropolitan area The South and West show greater racial integration than the Northeast and Midwest, data from the latest decadal census show.
Using academic research and decades of prior census results, The Wall Street Journal analyzed 2020 census data to see which households of whites, blacks, Latinos and Asians grouped most along racial lines. , and where they have become more mixed. Statistics show that, in general, the segregation of all racial groups continues to decline. Continuing from a peak that occurred around 1970.
The continued migration of Americans into the Sunbelt has helped to make parts of the South and West generally less isolated than the larger metropolises in the Northeast and Midwest. Much of their growth has taken place since the legal separation ended, creating new neighborhoods and even new cities. In addition, their development has been fueled by increasingly diverse immigration.
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Brown University professor John Logan, who has studied segregation with different measures since the 1970s, has documented similar trends. He and his colleagues have identified an emerging pattern in which the arrival of Latinos and Asians in predominantly white neighborhoods does not trigger white flight, even with the later arrival of black residents. . What he calls the “global neighbourhood” has become common in diverse metropolises, especially in the rapidly expanding Sunbelt.
In the Northeast and Midwest, people of different races remain segregated due to a pattern created after the massive migration of black people from the south in the first half of the 20th century. When segregation was legal, blacks were squeezed into strongly segregated areas, first in the cities and later in the post-war suburbs. The researchers say that even after court decisions and the adoption of legislation from the 1940s to 1970s ended legal segregation, residential segregation remained partly due to discrimination in education, employment, real estate and zoning.
Nationwide, whites and blacks live more apart from each other than any other racial group. In some instances the homes of Asians are becoming more clustered together as more move into the US, while Latinos are generally spreading as their economic profile approaches the national average.
This segregation index was calculated by researcher Benjamin Albers to measure the relative distribution of whites, blacks, Hispanics and Asians in the neighborhoods of more than 200 metro areas. Here are the results, shown on a scale where zero represents complete integration and 100 complete separation.
Racial Residential Segregation Index
100 = total isolation, 0 = no separation
100 = total isolation, 0 = no separation
100 = total isolation, 0 = no separation
100 = total isolation, 0 = no separation
100 = total isolation, 0 = no separation
Isolation measures the spatial pattern where people of different races and ethnicities live in a given area. Diversity measures the number and shares of groups, regardless of where they live in that area. Increasing diversity does not necessarily reduce isolation and may even increase it, especially when new waves of immigrants tend to cluster voluntarily.
Segregation between most groups has dropped since the 1990s, but it has risen for some.
Segregation of whites from other groups
The white-black separation is longer than that of any other pair. The segregation of whites from Hispanics has been declining since immigration increased in the 1990s. Asians remain the least isolated from whites, but levels have risen with Asian immigration.
segregation of blacks from other groups
Overall, these levels remain high but continue to fall. Black-Hispanic segregation has declined by more than a third, making them more integrated than any other pair.
The isolation of Hispanics from other groups
Hispanics are most integrated with other groups and their separation from Asians, whites and blacks is similar.
separating Asians from other groups
Asians are becoming more isolated from whites and Hispanics, although the level remains low. As Asians become more numerous throughout the South, their separation from Blacks is diminishing.
Segregation for most metro areas is low since 1990, but trends are different across regions. The charts below show the 1990 and 2020 indices for the largest metropolises in each region.
Midwest
Despite the sharp decline, some Midwest metropolises remain the most isolated. The patterns formed after what historians call the Great Migration of Black Southerners have been somewhat slow to change as the Midwest’s overall population growth has stalled, and it is less of an immigration destination than a Sunbelt hot spot. Is. In some heavily black neighborhoods, families have ties of generations that keep them in place, which further exacerbates these divisions.
Northeast
The Northeast metro areas also remained relatively isolated, especially the largest. Many evolved in different patterns over the decades and now see little new construction, which keeps housing costs high and limits the pace of change.
south
Strong development creates new neighbourhoods, which reduce the level of isolation by attracting diverse residents from across the country and from abroad. This includes the reverse migration of blacks into the region, attracted by jobs and a lower cost of living.
west
The level of segregation is generally low and uniform, indicating how much the area has developed since the end of the legal secession.
The two metro areas show how increasing diversity can produce different results in isolation.
In Chicago, old neighborhoods remain divided
Like many cities in the Northeast and Midwest, Chicago and its suburbs accommodated white immigrants from Europe and black immigrants from the South in varying patterns as the area developed. These maps show census tracts where residents of one caste or caste comprise the majority of residents, which indicates high levels of segregation, and areas where there is no racial majority, indicating greater admixture among residents. .
1990
About three-quarters of census areas in the Chicago metro area have a white racial majority. Many are over 90% white.
2000
Immigration is on the rise, and people from heavily segregated neighborhoods—Hispanic to the northwest and southwest and black to the west and south—are moving out of town.
2010
There is no racial majority in an increasing number of suburban census areas. Increasing immigration has led to the promotion of Hispanic enclaves in smaller towns at the edges of the metro area.
2020
More than half the localities have a white majority. The share without a majority has increased from 4% in 1990 to 16%.
But integration has not been as strong in some older suburbs and parts of the city.
Neighborhoods such as Austin are nearly all black, while across the city limits, Oak Park is more than two-thirds white. Such sharp racial boundaries remain in place throughout the metro area.
In Dallas, Rapid Growth Reshapes Racial Boundaries
Strong population growth in recent decades has given rise to new cities and neighborhoods and modified the landscape left by legal segregation.
1990
In many areas there was a white majority. Ten percent had a Hispanic or black majority. Just 6% did not have a racial majority.
2000
Many first-ring suburbs do not have majority locations.
2010
An explosion of diversity extends to the distant suburbs and transforms large parts of Dallas and Fort Worth.
2020
Only 41% of the areas have a white majority; 20% have a Hispanic majority. About a third do not have a majority.
A section of Dallas near its northeast edge shows a mix of clusters that are typical of metro area integration.
In contrast to Chicago’s older suburbs, fast-growing locations such as Plano and Garland show the rapid pace of change taking place in many southern and western metropolises.
methodology
Researchers use several measures to calculate residential segregation. Most rely on the concept of parity – the relative distribution of groups in each neighborhood compared to their shares in a larger area, often a metropolitan area. Researchers often use a measure called the Thill Index because it is less affected than others by changes in the makeup of the population, a trend that has been significant in the US during the past 30 years. Unlike some measures, it also allows the separation of several groups to be summarized into a single number. This varies from 0—perfect integration—to—1—perfect separation—but results are often expressed on a scale of 0 to 100 for readability.
This version of Thiel’s index was calculated by Benjamin Albers, who had recently completed postdoctoral sociology research at the University of Oxford. Mr. Albers summarized the separation of the four largest groups—whites, blacks, Hispanics and Asians—from each other in 229 metro areas where each census from 1990 to 2020 counted at least 1,000 members of each group. Went. The contribution of each to the metro in the national index was weighted by its 2020 population.
Note: All census tract and block-level race and ethnicity data have been standardized for the 2010 geographic boundaries through IPUMS NHGIS, University of Minnesota. The full extent of the Chicago and Dallas metro areas is not shown. Dallas metro maps showing city limits as of 2010.
Write to Paul Overberg at and Max Rust at
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