Daily Diversity Flows: Racial and Ethnic Context Between Home and Work

The racial and ethnic diversification of the U.S. population has transformed the demographic makeup of communities and rapidly increased exposure to diversity in American neighborhoods. Although diversity exposure occurs throughout people's daily lives, the conventional approach to describing diversity only at places of residence potentially understates the full extent of this phenomenon. In this study, we explore short-term, within-day changes in the diversity of different neighborhoods by considering U.S. workers' work and residential locations. Using estimates for daytime and nighttime populations among metropolitan census tracts, our empirical analyses investigate the extent to which the process of daytime mobility for work relates to changes in the racial and ethnic diversity of different spaces. Our results indicate widespread daily shifts toward diversity for most neighborhood types, especially those with residential (nighttime) populations that are predominantly Black, Latino, or Asian. We find that patterns of intraday diversification experienced minor declines across recent decades but are present in most metropolitan areas. Our findings also show that intraday changes in racial and ethnic diversity overlap with nonracial forms of daily diversity change. Further, average within-day changes in diversity are more pronounced in areas with greater residential segregation.