Global Neighborhoods' Contribution to Declining Residential Segregation.

• Author: Logan, John R.
• Position: Fair Housing Past, Present, and Future: Perspectives on Moving Toward Integration

CONTENTS INTRODUCTION: GLOBAL NEIGHBORHOODS' CONTRIBUTION TO DECLINING RESIDENTIAL SEGREGATION POPULATION DIVERSITY AND NEIGHBORHOOD CHANGE MEASURING THE EXTENT AND IMPACT OF GLOBAL NEIGHBORHOODS CHANGES IN THE SHARES OF GROUP MEMBERS IN EACH TYPE OF NEIGHBORHOOD MAPPING CHANGES OVER TIME: THE CASE OF DALLAS Figure 1A. Dallas neighborhoods by racial composition, 1980 Figure 1B. Dallas neighborhoods by racial composition, 2010 HOW NEIGHBORHOOD CHANGES AFFECT LEVELS OF SEGREGATION Figure 2. The relationship between growth of global neighborhoods And declining segregation in multiethnic metropolitan regions, 1980-2010 CONCLUSION APPENDIX A. LISTING OF MULTIETHNIC METROPOLITAN REGIONS INTRODUCTION: GLOBAL NEIGHBORHOODS' CONTRIBUTION TO DECLINING RESIDENTIAL SEGREGATION

Residential segregation remains high for African Americans. (1) Despite the progress achieved since the historic high point of black ghettoization (around 1970), change is best described as slow and uneven. (2) One of the authors has previously described a set of large Northeastern and Midwestern metropolitan areas, home to about one in five African Americans in 2010, as "America's Ghetto Belt." (3) In these metros, segregation remains close to its 1980 levels. Major legislative and court battles have been waged during this period seeking to engage state power in the struggle for fair housing. Yet the main legislative accomplishment, the 1968 Fair Housing Act, has been described as "intentionally designed so that it would not and could not work." (4) Other legislation at the state level in the same era was "characterized by narrow-to-modest coverage, weak enforcement provisions, and tentative moves by administrators." (5) Among major court victories by fair-housing advocates are the Mount Laurel decisions (6)--which imposed regional housing responsibilities on localities in New Jersey (7)--and United States v. Yonkers Board of Education (8) and Hills v. Gautreaux (9)--both of which addressed the siting of affordable housing in poor and minority neighborhoods. One extensive review of these cases identifies very modest real-world impacts of the remedies in the Mount Laurel and Yonkers cases. (10) Where there was progress, as in Gautreaux. success hinged on implementing a special counseling program and providing Section 8 housing vouchers that could be used outside Chicago, innovations that proved to be temporary. (11)

In this study, our point is that the patterns of change and the persistence of segregation are unlikely to be influenced as much by public policy as by more profound structural changes in the white and minority populations. We are not arguing against fair-housing efforts; we suspect that these efforts have played an indirect role in creating the conditions for neighborhood diversity. Instead we wish to make the case that fair-housing advocates need to be aware of and seek to leverage the underlying population shifts that create new potential for reducing segregation. Here, we emphasize specifically the massive increase in Hispanic and Asian residents in urban areas fueled by post1980 immigration. Previous studies have demonstrated that the new multiethnic composition of the metropolis seems favorable to increasing neighborhood diversity. (12) We document here the emergence of more diverse kinds of neighborhoods in all parts of the country and the increasing shares of residents who live in such neighborhoods, especially in multiethnic metros. We then show how much these trends have affected segregation of blacks from whites in the last three decades.

POPULATION DIVERSITY AND NEIGHBORHOOD CHANGE

Conditions have changed since the period when black-white segregation grew to extreme levels across the country in the early and mid-twentieth century. With the cutoff of European immigration in the 1920s, the main source of new populations in growing urban areas became migration from the South, principally, but not entirely, African American. (13) Already well established by 1940, the Great Migration accelerated after World War II, moving African Americans into cities that were beginning to be left behind by white suburbanization. (14) In this context, the predominant pattern of urban-neighborhood change was what social scientists referred to as "invasion-succession." (15) Black residents were becoming concentrated in high-density black neighborhoods and spilling over into previously all-white neighborhood, leading to white flight and racial succession. (16) For some time, there has been speculation that this pattern would be disrupted by the arrival of immigrant minorities. (17) Frey and Farley hypothesized that immigrants would provide a "buffer" between whites and blacks, making it less likely that whites would leave neighborhoods that became more diverse. (18) We confirmed this idea in a study of racial transitions in multiethnic metropolitan areas between 1980 and 2000. (19) We showed that although white flight continued, there was a strong countertrend toward more diverse neighborhoods. (20) Specifically, we identified a pathway of change in which Hispanics or Asians or both entered allwhite neighborhoods, after which African Americans could also enter without necessarily stimulating white flight. (21) We called such cases where all four groups were present "global neighborhoods." (22)

MEASURING THE EXTENT AND IMPACT OF GLOBAL NEIGHBORHOODS

In order to document the extent of new forms of neighborhood diversity and their impact on residential segregation at the metropolitan scale, we analyze data from the Census of Population in 1980 and 2010. We categorize residents into four major racial or ethnic groups: non-Hispanic whites (single race in 2010), non-Hispanic blacks (including combinations of black and another race in 2010), non-Hispanic Asians (including combinations of Asian with another race except black in 2010), and Hispanics. (23) We treat the census tract as a proxy for residential neighborhood. With about 4,000 inhabitants on average, census tracts are designed to be relatively homogeneous units with respect to population characteristics, economic status, and living conditions. (24) We rely on data from "the Longitudinal Tract Data Base (LTDB), which provides public-use tools to create estimates within 2010 tract boundaries for any tract-level data (from the census or other sources) that are available for prior years as...