Abstract
Neighborhoods where blacks and whites live in integrated settings alongside Hispanics and Asians represent a new phenomenon in the United States. These “global neighborhoods” have previously been identified in the nation’s most diverse metropolitan centers. This study examines the full range of metropolitan areas to ask whether similar processes are occurring in other parts of the country. Is there evidence of stable racial integration in places that lack such diversity? What are the paths of neighborhood change in areas with few Hispanic or Asian residents, or areas where Hispanics are the principal minority group, or where there is no large minority presence at all? We distinguish four types of metropolitan regions: white, white/black, white/Hispanic/Asian, and multiethnic. These regions necessarily differ greatly in neighborhood composition, but some similar trajectories of neighborhood change are found in all of them. The results provide new evidence of the effect of Hispanic and Asian presence on black-white segregation in all parts of the country.
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Notes
We also noted that global neighborhoods tend to evolve and stabilize in areas with higher than average income and education—areas whose amenities remain attractive to white residents. In this study we will not pursue the relationships between racial/ethnic change and socioeconomic status.
We note two differences between the Frey and Farley (1996) ethnic classification and the typology used here. First, Frey and Farley used MSA/PMSAs as defined in 1990 and studied 37 of these that they classified as multiethnic. Second, their classification contains five categories: “multiethnic” (whites with 2 or 3 minority groups), “mostly Latino-white,” “mostly Asian-white,” “mostly black-white,” and “mostly white.” We reorganize and reduce these to four categories with special attention to whether the metropolitan area included a black presence: multiethnic (whites and blacks with Hispanics and/or Asians), immigrant minority without blacks (whites with Hispanics and/or Asians), white-black, and white.
The three non-Hispanic groups are non-Hispanic white (single race in 2010), non-Hispanic black (including combinations of black and another race in 2010), and non-Hispanic Asian (including combinations of Asian with another race except black in 2010). Here we refer to them simply as whites, blacks, and Asians.
These resemble multiethnic metropolitan areas as defined by Logan and Zhang (2010), but exclude metros where Hispanics and Asians meet the national average but blacks meet only one- half the national average. In this study, such metros are included in the IM category.
In separate analyses, we experimented with setting different criteria for each metro category. These analyses yielded such low thresholds for Hispanics and Asians, especially in white and white-black metros, that we do not consider them to be credible.
For this purpose, we treat tracts that fall along the diagonal in Tables 3, 4, 5, and 6 as unchanging, those above the diagonal as increasing diversity, and those below the diagonal as decreasing diversity. Implicitly this means that we are treating the order of columns or rows in these tables as ordinal scales from the least diverse (nw or w) to the most diverse (wbha). A case might be made for a different ordering in the case of a transition from nw to w or wha to wb. However, such transitions (in either direction) are almost nonexistent.
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Acknowledgments
This research was partially supported by the US2010 Project with funding from the Russell Sage Foundation. General infrastructure support was provided by Spatial Structures in the Social Sciences (S4) and by the Population Studies and Training Center, Brown University (R24 HD041020).
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Zhang, W., Logan, J.R. Global Neighborhoods: Beyond the Multiethnic Metropolis. Demography 53, 1933–1953 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-016-0516-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-016-0516-4