Here is today's next selection from the ACS data dump. It's an odd statistic called the Racial Dissimilarity Index, which measures the percentage of white folks who would have to move in order to have the same racial distribution everywhere.
In other words, lower is better. It means a city is less segregated. For a long time I've been hearing that cities are becoming more self-segregated, but at least since 2010 that turns out not to be true:
The numbers were down in every big county except Dallas, Miami-Dade, and Riverside.
Admittedly, this is still not much of a picture of racial harmony and bliss, but at least things are improving. And as usual, some of this segregation is just a symptom of a bigger problem: Neighborhoods naturally segregate by wealth, and Black families earn a lot less money than white families (37% less in 2023). It's one of the few truly intractable big problems we face even after decades of efforts.
“Big” here means populous I assume?
The self-selection I worry about is not by race, but by politics. That is more interesting from my point of view. The less self-selection in this respect there is, the harder it is to gerrymander.
Race and politics are not orthogonal. It's the same phenomenon viewed from slightly different perspectives.
They may not be orthogonal, but they're not the same phenomenon, either. Where gerrymandering is concerned, segregation by politics is the relevant metric.
And where segregation by politics is concerned, it's not so much segregation within cities that matters, but differences between cities and the surrounding suburbs.
I wonder how much that is due to charter schools, which can be as segregated as they want. Charter schools don't have to actively try to be segregated - there are socioeconomic and cultural differences they can focus on to achieve that end - although many charters do announce an ethnic focus in the name.
When your kid can attend the school of your choice no matter where you live, it becomes easier to gentrify. The high number of households with no children can also do this.
Judging from my knowledge of Brooklyn, white younger people are moving to previously minority areas because they are priced out of more uniformly white neighborhoods. And many gentrifying areas of New York are somewhat racially mixed.
That's normal, and not specifically bad, unless it begins sorting socioeconomically and housing isn't continuing to be built.
Because those with will always price out those without if they have to fight for the same housing.
Melting pot or mosaic? Cities are dynamic, but ethnic enclaves that preserve some traditions help give cities their character.
That's why it's important to continue to build housing - so kids don't have to move away from their families and vice versa for their parents.
When I see this type of analysis, and think about the rapid rise in mixed race couples, I wonder how they report/how much of this is just a reporting error.
It isn't just self segregation by wealth.
If you could move to a nice area which was 60% black and buy a house for $400,000 OR you could move to an area EXACTLY as nice but was 95% white and buy a house for $500,000, which would you choose?
Which would the typical black family pick?
Which would the typical white family pick?
Which ones would the real estate agent mention to you?
I don't know how this index is computed but I suspect the change is related to the overall decline in the fraction of the population that is white.
What looks like a decline in self-segregation could be gentrification, leaving blacks and many others with nowhere to go.
How about demographics? The US is just less White every year.
The White population of the US was 223,553,265 in 2010, and decreased to 204,277,273 by 2020.
Self-segregating is harder when intermarriages are booming.