Michael Bader, an assistant professor of sociology at American University in Washington, D.C., analyzed census data in more than 10,000 neighborhoods of four major U.S. metropolitan areas: New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Houston. He found that many of the neighborhoods in these cities that had become more racially diverse in the 1960s and 1970s, have now faced a significant level of resegregation. In fact, 35 percent of all the neighborhoods examined by Bader had experienced “steady resegregation.”
Bader notes that “Blacks and Latinos are open to moving to different neighborhoods. Whites are largely unwilling. Whites are OK if integration comes to them, but they don’t actively seek it out.”
The study, “The Fragmented Evolution of Racial Integration Since the Civil Rights Movement” is published on the website of the journal Sociological Science. Maps showing the racial makeup of neighborhoods in the four metropolitan areas can be viewed here.
