Race and Residence

No. 3 in The "Neighborhood Change in Urban America" Series

The nonpartisan Urban Institute publishes studies, reports, and books on timely topics worthy of public consideration. The views expressed are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the Urban Institute, its trustees, or its funders.

Note: This report is available in its entirety in the Portable Document Format (PDF).

Over the past several decades, neighborhoods in U.S. metropolitan areas have undergone considerable racial and ethnic change. The last 10 years in particular have witnessed dramatic increases in black, Hispanic, and Asian populations in city and suburban neighborhoods throughout the country. This brief focuses on one dimension of our growing diversity—shifts in the black-white composition of neighborhoods in large metropolitan areas nationwide. Other research has shown that the neighborhoods in which we live are gradually becoming less segregated along black-white lines. But less is known about how this process is occurring. As such, two questions emerge. First, are all neighborhoods becoming more integrated, regardless of their initial racial composition? Second, are racially mixed neighborhoods stable, or do they inevitably become increasingly segregated once they reach a certain critical threshold of black representation?

To address these questions, we analyzed changes from 1990 to 2000 in the racial composition of neighborhoods in the 100 largest metropolitan areas.¹ Because our specific focus is on black-white differences, we omit from the analysis those metropolitan areas among the 100 largest where blacks are not the dominant minority or where Hispanics (the next largest minority group nationwide) constitute more than 20 percent of the metropolitan area's population.² This leaves 69 large metropolitan areas with 25,134 neighborhoods. Using the Neighborhood Change Database, we are able to track changes in the black-white composition of neighborhoods over the 1990s, and analyze how much the starting composition of a neighborhood influenced its trajectory.³

The findings from this analysis offer grounds for cautious optimism about the prospects for stable black-white integration in city and suburban neighborhoods. Specifically,

• The number of neighborhoods that exclude blacks altogether is shrinking, with black representation rising in a substantial share of neighborhoods that were exclusively white at the start of the 1990s.
• Racially mixed neighborhoods do not inevitably become more predominantly black over time; many neighborhoods that were racially mixed in 1990 stayed essentially the same over the course of the decade.
• This basic pattern applies to both suburban and city neighborhoods, and is not affected by the size of a metropolitan area's black population. In fact, racially mixed suburban neighborhoods were more likely to remain the same during the 1990s than those in central cities.
• However, relatively few neighborhoods that were predominantly or exclusively black at the start of the decade gained white population, and majority black neighborhoods were considerably more likely than majority white neighborhoods to gain black population.

Thus, more neighborhoods in metropolitan America are shared by blacks and whites today than a decade ago, and many racially integrated neighborhoods appear reasonably stable. The assumption that once a neighborhood becomes racially mixed it will inevitably "tip," becoming more and more predominantly black, is not supported by the evidence of the 1990s. Nonetheless, many neighborhoods remain either exclusively white or exclusively black, and neighborhoods where blacks are in the majority are more likely to gain black population than to become more racially integrated. These findings indicate that, despite considerable progress, achieving and sustaining widespread stable racial integration remains an unmet challenge.

Note: This report is available in its entirety in the Portable Document Format (PDF).

Endnotes

1. For the purposes of this analysis, we define neighborhoods as census tracts.

2. It is important to recognize that by focusing on patterns of black-white change, this analysis excludes several of the nation's largest urban areas, including New York, Los Angeles, and Miami. Although we limit the number of Hispanics at the metropolitan statistical area level we realize that our analysis likely still includes neighborhoods with a significant presence of Hispanics, Asians, and other ethnic minorities. In future studies, we hope to explore patterns of multiethnic neighborhood change.

3. The Neighborhood Change Database (NCDB) is the main source of decennial census data used in this report. Funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, the NCDB is a joint project between the Urban Institute and Geolytics, Inc., to develop a national set of comparable population and housing variables from the 1970, 1980, 1990, and 2000 decennial censuses. Amethodology has been developed to link the associated data to 2000 census tract boundaries so that consistent comparisons can be made across census years.

The nonpartisan Urban Institute publishes studies, reports, and books on timely topics worthy of public consideration. The views expressed are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the Urban Institute, its trustees, or its funders.

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