Remaking White Residential Segregation: Metropolitan Diversity and Neighborhood Change in the United States

Between 1990 and 2010, the white population share in US metropolitan areas fell from 73.5 percent to 60.3 percent. This paper explores how this decline affected the number and composition of white census tracts (tracts in which non-Latino whites constitute the largest group). In 1990, white tracts comprised 82 percent of all metropolitan tracts. By 2010, this percentage had fallen to 70 percent, paralleling the percentage point drop in white population share. This loss was concentrated among the most segregated white tracts - those with low diversity. White tracts that were moderately diverse actually doubled in number between 1990 and 2010 although this increase was insufficient to cancel the loss of low diversity white tracts. We model the effects of metropolitan characteristics on white-tract change by metropolitan area. Greater metropolitan-scale diversity increases the probability that low-diversity white tracts transition to moderate-diversity white. Moderately diverse white tracts, however, become more stable with increased diversity. A large metropolitan percentage of blacks or the foreign born, however, reverses this stabilizing effect, increasing the probability that moderately diverse white tracts transition to non-white tracts (i.e. where a non-white group is the largest group). Thus the level and composition of metropolitan diversity matters for the trajectory of moderately diverse white tracts. Overall, the formation of new white tracts, possibly the result of gentrification, coupled with the emergence of moderately diverse white tracts and an increasing share of whites living in such residential environments, suggests a reconfiguration rather than a dissolving of white dominated neighborhood space in response to increased diversity in surrounding metropolitan contexts.