“All-white neighborhoods are effectively extinct. A half-century ago, one-fifth of America’s urban neighborhoods had exactly zero black residents. Today, African-American residents can be found in 199 out of every 200 neighborhoods nationwide. The remaining neighborhoods are mostly in remote rural areas or in cities with very little black population.” Using the census definition, the term “neighborhood” is defined as a tract with a population of 1,500 to 7,500 people. Of the 72,531 census tracts in the United States, only 424 had no African-American residents.

 

“Ghetto neighborhoods persist, but most are in decline. For every diversifying ghetto neighborhood, many more house a dwindling population of black residents.”

 

Some social scientists cautioned that the survey could be misread. Douglas Massey, a Princeton sociologist, told The New York Times that “Although all-white neighborhoods have largely disappeared, this is more due to the entry of Latinos and Asians into formerly all-white neighborhoods.” William H. Frey of The Brookings Institute pointed out that “the 2010 census shows that the average black resident still lives in a neighborhood that is 45 percent black and 36 percent white. At the same time, the average white lives in a neighborhood that is 78 percent white and 7 percent black.”

 

Even the authors of the Manhattan Institute report, Edward Glaeser of Harvard and Jacob L. Vigdor of Duke, conclude that the 1960s dream that ending housing segregation would solve the economic problems faced by African-Americans “this dream was a myth....There has been only limited progress in closing achievement and employment gaps between blacks and whites. The difficult lesson of these decades is that society is complicated and single solutions rarely solve everything. While the decline in segregation remains good news, far too many Americans still lack the opportunity to achieve meaningful success.”

-David Wallechinsky, Noel Brinkerhoff

 

Segregation Curtailed in U.S. Cities, Study Finds (by Sam Roberts, New York Times)