Black-White and Hispanic Segregation Magnitudes and Trends from the 2016 American Community Survey

John D. Landis
University of Pennsylvania

This article takes a fresh look at the incidence of Black-White and Hispanic-Non-Hispanic segregation across metropolitan America using 5-year estimates from the 2016 American Community Survey (ACS). Until recently, researchers had to wait for the publication of the Decennial Census for this type of data, but in 2015, the Census Bureau added census tract-level tabulations of demographic and economic data to the ACS, making it possible to track neighborhood and metropolitan-level changes at more frequent intervals. This analysis adds to the discussion about residential segregation and opportunity in five ways. First, as noted above, it is as up-to-date as the data will allow, and employs two complementary (rather than substitutable) measures of residential segregation. Second, it considers Black-White and Hispanic-non-Hispanic segregation in parallel, gaining mutual insights from each. Third and most important, it is undertaken at the metropolitan scale, the geography at which today’s housing markets function. Fourth, it considers variations in segregation levels by metropolitan area size, something that has not been done before. Lastly, it looks at the associations between changes in residential segregation levels between 2000 and 2016 and various measures of metropolitan growth, demographic composition, residential mobility, and land use regulatory regimes.