If Residential Segregation Persists, What Explains Widespread Increases in Residential Diversity?

Recent studies have identified increasing residential diversity as a near-universal trend across the United States. At the same time, a wide range of scholarship notes the persistence of White flight and other mechanisms that reproduce residential segregation. In this article, we attempt to reconcile these findings by arguing that current trends toward increased residential diversity may sometimes mask population changes that are more consistent with racial turnover and eventual resegregation. Specifically, we show that increases in diversity occur nearly identically across neighborhoods where White populations remain stable or decline in the face of non-White population growth. Our findings demonstrate that, particularly in its early stages, racial turnover decouples diversity and integration, leading to increases in diversity without corresponding increases in residential integration. These results suggest that in many neighborhoods, diversity increases may be transitory phenomena driven primarily by a neighborhood's location in the racial turnover process. In the future, stalled or decreasing levels of diversity may become more common in these areas as segregation persists and the process of racial turnover continues.