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White Residential Segregation in U.S. Metropolitan Areas: Conceptual Issues, Patterns, and Trends from the U.S. Census, 1980 to 2010

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Abstract

Racial and ethnic diversity continues to spread to communities across the United States. Rather than focus on the residential patterns of specific minority or immigrant groups, this study examines changing patterns of White residential segregation in metropolitan America. Using data from the 1980 to 2010 decennial censuses, we calculate levels of White segregation using two common measures, analyze the effect of defining the White population in different ways, and, drawing upon the group threat theoretical perspective, we examine the metropolitan correlates of White segregation. We find that White segregation from others declined significantly from 1980 to 2010, regardless of the measure of segregation or the White population used. However, we find some evidence consistent with the group threat perspective, as White dissimilarity is higher in metro areas that are more diverse, and especially those with larger Black populations. Nevertheless, our findings indicate that Whites having been living in increasingly integrated neighborhoods over the last few decades, suggesting some easing of the historical color line.

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Notes

  1. We conducted some analyses back to 1970. The challenge with using 1970 data is that one cannot distinguish between the “white” and “non-Hispanic white” population in census public use files. We also do not have data on the number of Asians in that year. These omissions mean that we cannot conduct many of our analyses with data from that year. The number of metropolitan areas in that year was also considerably smaller than in subsequent years. Overall, the declines in white segregation from nonwhites and from blacks we see from 1980 onward were evident in the 1970 to 1980 period as well.

  2. Random factors and geocoding errors are more likely to play a large role in determining the settlement pattern of group members when fewer members are present, causing these indexes to contain greater volatility (Iceland et al. 2002).

  3. For 1980 we use all Asians (and not non-Hispanic Asians) in this calculation because there was no public-use data available on Asians by Hispanic origin in that year. When examining all whites, other races in these calculations (which appear only in the last row in Tables 1, 2 only) includes individuals who are not white, black, or Asian. When examining non-Hispanic whites, other races include those who are not non-Hispanic black, non-Hispanic Asian, or Hispanic.

  4. While most independent variables are calculated using the 2006–2010 ACS data, our racial composition variables are based on 2010 decennial data.

  5. A significant Breusch-Pagan Lagrange multiplier test confirmed our use of random-effects models over simple OLS regression. We also ran fixed-effects models, which are focused on within-metropolitan variation and changes over time, and received very similar results that do not alter our conclusions about the association between diversity/racial composition and White segregation. Moreover, a random-effects approach provides the average within- and between-metropolitan effect, which we contend is more appropriate for answering our research questions.

  6. We also considered using a variable indicating the proportion of housing built before 1950; the coefficient yielded similar conclusions as the proportion of housing built in the past 10 years.

  7. Because the intercepts in the models are negative, a potential concern is that predicted probabilities might fall out of a reasonable range for dissimilarity (the index ranges from 0 to 1). Thus, we calculated predicted probabilities for the regressions and find that they all fall within 0 to 1 as expected.

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Acknowledgment

This research was supported by the National Institutes of Health, Population Research Institute Center Grant, R24HD041025.

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  1. Department of Sociology, Penn State University, 211 Oswald Tower, University Park, PA, 16802, USA

    John Iceland & Gregory Sharp

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  1. John Iceland
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Correspondence to John Iceland.

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Iceland, J., Sharp, G. White Residential Segregation in U.S. Metropolitan Areas: Conceptual Issues, Patterns, and Trends from the U.S. Census, 1980 to 2010. Popul Res Policy Rev 32, 663–686 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11113-013-9277-6

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