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Immigration is bringing profound changes to urban and suburban neighborhoods across the country. But research on the racial and ethnic composition of neighborhoods has lagged, still focusing primarily on traditional, two-way measures of residential segregation and on citywide or metropolitan-wide disparities. At the same time, many housing and community development practitioners are working to promote mixed-income communities, so that lower-income households can enjoy greater access to quality public and private services and to mainstream social and economic opportunities. But surprisingly little is known about the extent of mixed-income neighborhoods in urban and suburban communities today, or about their racial and ethnic diversity.

Policymakers and practitioners need new ways to understand patterns of neighborhood diversity (racial, ethnic, and economic) in their communities, and to track changes in these patterns over time. Therefore, this paper uses decennial census data to develop a new set of neighborhood typologies—strategies for grouping census tracts into categories that reflect important differences in the income groups represented, as well as the extent of racial and ethnic diversity. These new typologies certainly do not represent the only meaningful way to categorize neighborhoods, but are designed to provide researchers and practitioners with effective tools for describing the extent of neighborhood diversity and for exploring the implications of diversity for families and communities.

In addition to defining these new typologies, this paper documents the prevalence of diverse neighborhoods (of different types), describes their geographic distribution (across cities and suburbs in different regions of the country), and explores how diverse neighborhoods of various types changed between 1990 and 2000, including the extent to which some are stable while others are transitional. These new typologies will be incorporated into DataPlace, which provides easy access to a wide range of housing-related indicators for communities nationwide. The analysis presented here is based on all census tracts in the nation's 100 largest metropolitan areas,¹ which (as of 2000) account for 61.6 percent of the nation's total population and an even larger share of the minority and foreign born populations. As Exhibit 1 illustrates, these metropolitan areas have a higher share of both minority and foreign born residents than all U.S. metros, and substantially higher shares than the U.S. population as a whole. Poverty rates, on the other hand are about the same for the 100 largest metros as for all metros, and slightly lower than for the U.S. population as a whole.

1 Annex A provides a list of these metropolitan areas.

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Disclaimer: 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.