Black segregation from other racial groups has hit its lowest point in more than a century - declining in all 85 of the nation's largest metropolitan areas - but social and income inequality persist.
A Manhattan Institute report out Monday shows that no housing market has a level of black isolation as high as the national average just 40 years ago and that "all-white neighborhoods are effectively extinct."
"This shift does not mean that segregation has disappeared," the report says. "The typical urban African American lives in a housing market where more than half the black population would need to move in order to achieve complete integration."
The research by Harvard University economics professor Edward Glaeser and Duke University professor Jacob Vigdor, both fellows at the conservative think tank's Center for State and Local Leadership, looked at every Census since 1890. It found that black suburbanization, gentrification, access to credit, fair housing laws and immigration have all contributed to a significant decline in black segregation.
"America is now more racially integrated than any time in the past century," Vigdor says. "There's been black suburbanization and the elimination of lily-white neighborhoods."
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The nation's most racially segregated cities in 1970 became more integrated by 2010. Decline in percentage points in a key measure of segregation in those cities:
Another segregation expert expressed caution.
"We're nowhere near the end of segregation," says Brown University sociologist John Logan, who was not involved in the study. "There are still no signs of whites moving into what were previously all-minority neighborhoods and there is still considerable white abandonment of mixed areas."
Among the Institute's findings:
•Chicago had the second-largest decline (after Houston) in two key measures of segregation - dissimilarity and isolation.
The first measures the extent to which two groups are found in equal proportion in all neighborhoods. The latter measures the tendency for one racial group to live in neighborhoods where their share of the population is higher than the citywide average.
Despite Chicago's dip in segregation measures, it remains the most segregated large city.
•Sun Belt Cities such as Dallas and Houston have the lowest level of segregation.
Segregation dropped faster in metropolitan areas that grew the fastest because of migration and immigration, many in areas of the Sun Belt that boomed in recent decades.
Segregration rose the most in areas that had small black populations to begin with. Boise, Idaho, had the largest increase.
•As other research has shown, some of the nation's most segregated cities - Detroit and Kansas City among them - have experienced declines, largely driven by an exodus of blacks to the suburbs and other regions.
The research focuses on blacks and non-blacks, a broad group that includes non-Hispanic whites, Hispanics who can be of any race, Asians and others - some who were not identified in previous Censuses.
"That's a wide spectrum and it does not necessarily address the black-white issue," Logan says. "They don't point out that blacks continue to live in majority-minority neighborhoods and that their declining isolation is mainly due to living with Hispanics and Asians."
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