Trends and Characteristics of U.S. Metropolitan Neighborhood Integration, 2000-2020

Matthew Mleczko (Rutgers University, New Brunswick)

Integration, arguably one of the primary goals of the Civil Rights Movement, has become a topic of renewed interest among scholars as a means of promoting racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic equity in the United States. Dr. Elizabeth Anderson in particular argues that integration “consists in comprehensive intergroup association on terms of equality” (Anderson 2010, 113). Conceptions of integration like this represent a more expansive understanding of integration than how most researchers measure it and likely how most of us understand it.

Segregation and integration represent two commonly studied sociodemographic processes, but our approaches to measuring these phenomena are far more equipped to capture the former. Whereas innovative approaches to measuring segregation have proliferated over the years, most studies of integration rely on proxy measures of integration like racial diversity or lack of racial segregation, which represent necessary, but insufficient conditions of integration. Moreover, as others have pointed out, nearly all of our measures of integration ignore its vitally important social dimensions (e.g., neighbors building relationships across race, ethnicity, and class), relying instead on numerical measures of integration – measures that only consider the demographic or socioeconomic composition of the neighborhood (Sin and Krysan 2015).

In this study, I advance a more comprehensive approach to measuring numerical integration at the neighborhood level for most U.S. metropolitan census tracts over the years 2000 to 2020. For instance, I measure racial and ethnic as well as income diversity together to account for how these dimensions of integration and segregation interact. I also account for the overlap between neighborhood and regional racial and ethnic as well as household income compositions – similar to many segregation measures. Finally, though I lack data on social interactions throughout the study period, I still compare how average levels of social capital compare across segregated and integrated neighborhoods.

The result is a more comprehensive approach to measuring an integrated neighborhood – one in which there is a reasonable amount of racial, ethnic, and income diversity (which includes the requirement that Black and Hispanic/Latino residents account for at least 20% of the neighborhood and that household poverty rates are below 0.4) and that this diversity is congruent with the regional sociodemographic profile. This approach allows researchers to distinguish between neighborhoods that grow more racially diverse and economically homogeneous or vice versa. It also allows researchers to determine trends in residential integration when accounting for race and ethnicity together with household income, which can help resolve the debate over the stability of neighborhood integration. 

These measures of neighborhood integration are now publicly available resources. Anyone can access the following map of these data and enter an address to find a given census tract and its integration trajectory along with information on its current racial, ethnic, and income composition. Those interested in accessing the underlying data can also do so here.

The results of my analyses show that neighborhoods integrated by race/ethnicity and income grew more common over the past two decades. The share of metropolitan neighborhoods integrated along both of these dimensions grew from 0.24 in 2000 to 0.34 by 2020. Integrated neighborhoods tended to stay integrated over the study period – 80% of neighborhoods integrated in 2000 were integrated by 2010 and 89% of neighborhoods integrated in 2010 were integrated by 2020 – and of neighborhoods that transitioned to segregation or integration, the vast majority (74%) transitioned toward integration. This movement toward integration seems to have been primarily driven by formerly segregated white neighborhoods and formerly segregated low-income neighborhoods that grew more numerically integrated.

Yet, persistent segregation – neighborhoods that were segregated in 2000, 2010, and 2020 – represent by far the most common neighborhood typology (63.2% of neighborhoods). The majority of these neighborhoods are those where high-income white households form a majority or plurality of residents (29.4%), representing the modal neighborhood in the metropolitan United States. While many different types of persistently segregated neighborhoods exist, high-income white neighborhoods and low-income Black neighborhoods comprised the vast majority, demonstrating stubborn fault lines that continue to characterize our segregated status quo. 

As for how neighborhood integration relates to social capital, jointly segregated neighborhoods tend to reflect higher levels of social capital relative to jointly integrated neighborhoods. Neighborhoods with the highest levels of social capital tend to have high median household incomes and low poverty rates. White high-income neighborhoods comprise a majority of these neighborhoods. Socioeconomically integrated neighborhoods appear to reflect higher average levels of social capital than racially and jointly integrated neighborhoods. Yet, over 1,000 jointly integrated neighborhoods reflect above-average levels of social capital, suggesting that intergroup interaction does regularly occur in neighborhoods numerically integrated by race, ethnicity, and income.

The past two decades have featured population trends that likely explain much of these results. One includes increases in suburban moves among residents of color (Massey and Tannen 2018). Relatedly, increasing immigration from fast-growing Hispanic/Latino and Asian populations have reshaped many communities, both in traditional immigrant destinations and in communities with previously low levels and shares of immigrants (Davis 2001; Dawkins 2009; Blau and Mackie 2017; Sandoval-Strausz 2019). Another major trend includes return to the city moves, particularly among highly-educated and young white residents (Lee et al. 2024; Mallach 2018). The results of this study seem to suggest that these population trends helped to promote numerical integration, though other developments like residential, cultural, and political displacement in changing neighborhoods due to white in-migration and growing rates of suburban poverty also remind us that numerical integration alone is insufficient for promoting equitable communities (Hyra 2015; Kneebone and Garr 2010; Hepburn et al. 2023).

The main takeaway from this research is that segregation persists because segregated neighborhoods persist, not because integrated neighborhoods fail to stay integrated. If we consider integration to be a compelling policy objective, which over 100 years’ worth of social science evidence strongly suggests to be the case, then we should be targeting integrative policies towards our stubbornly segregated neighborhoods and not just the neighborhoods transitioning towards segregation. The former considerably outnumber the latter. At the same time, we should be exploring ways to promote more positive intergroup contact in numerically integrated neighborhoods since numerical integration alone appears to be an insufficient condition of socially integrated and cohesive communities.

 

Read the full UAR article here.

References

Anderson, Elizabeth. 2010. The Imperative of Integration. Princeton: Princeton Univ.Press

Blau, Francine D., and Christopher Mackie. 2017. The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration. Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/23550.

Davis, Mike. 2001. Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the U.S. Big City. London: Verso Books.

Dawkins, Casey J. 2009. “Exploring Recent Trends in Immigrant Suburbanization.” Cityscape (Washington, D C) 11 (3): 81–97.

Hepburn, Peter, Devin Q. Rutan, and Matthew Desmond. 2023. “Beyond Urban Displacement: Suburban Poverty and Eviction.” Urban Affairs Review 59 (3):759–92. https://doi.org/10.1177/10780874221085676.

Hyra, Derek. 2015. “The Back-to-the-City Movement: Neighbourhood Redevelopment and Processes of Political and Cultural Displacement.” Urban Studies 52 (10):1753–73. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098014539403.

Kneebone, Elizabeth, and Emily Garr. 2010. The Suburbanization of Poverty: Trends in Metropolitan America, 2000 to 2008. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, Metropolitan Opportunity Series.

Lee, Hyojung, Whitney Airgood-Obrycki, and Riordan Frost. 2024. “Back to the Suburbs? Millennial Residential Locations from the Great Recession to the Pandemic.” Urban Studies, 61 (10): 1871–1890. https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980231221048.

Mallach, Alan. 2018. The Divided City: Poverty and Prosperity in Urban America. Washington, DC: Island Press.

Massey, Douglas S., and Jonathan Tannen. 2018. “Suburbanization and Segregation inthe United States: 1970–2010.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 41 (9): 1594–611. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2017.1312010.

Sandoval-Strausz, A. K. 2019. Barrio America: How Latino Immigrants Saved the American City. New York: Basic Books.

Sin, Ray, and Maria Krysan. 2015. “What Is Racial Residential Integration? A ResearchSynthesis, 1950–2013.” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 1 (4): 467–74. https://doi.org/10.1177/2332649215598159.


Matthew Mleczko is a Post-Doctoral associate at Rutgers University, jointly appointed in the Ralph W. Voorhees Center for Civic Engagement in the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy and the Center for State Health Policy. He studies integration, housing, poverty, and inequality, with a particular focus on the role of housing policies and practices in fostering equitably integrated communities. He received his Ph.D. in Population Studies and Social Policy from Princeton University in 2024.

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