Housing and race relations

SIGNIFICANCE: The residential conditions and distribution of ethnic and racial minority groups in the United States are consequences of social and economic factors as well as of the characteristics of the localities in which these groups live. Principal processes are immigration, regional migration and distribution, acculturation and social mobility, racism, and discrimination.

African Americans, historically the largest US ethnic or racial minority, have been a predominantly metropolitan-area population. At the time of the 2020 Census, about 54 percent resided in suburbs of large metropolitan areas. In contrast, 76 percent of the White population was suburban. In part, this reflects the historically greater share of home ownership by White Americans as compared to African Americans.

The African American population has been predominantly southern: a quarter or more of the residents of Mississippi, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, Alabama, and South Carolina in 2020 were Black or African American alone. Many Black Americans lived in the Northeast and the Midwest but very few in the West, with the exception of California. The metropolitan areas with the largest Black population included New York City, Atlanta, Georgia; Houston, Texas; Dallas, Texas; Miami, Florida; and Chicago, Illinois.

Hispanics, many of whom are recent immigrants, were concentrated primarily in New Mexico, California, Texas, Arizona, Nevada, and Florida. Seven large metropolitan areas were together home to nearly half the nation’s Latinos: New York City; Miami, Chicago, Houston, Dallas, and Riverside and Los Angeles, California.

A majority of Latino people were metropolitan-area residents. The metropolitan area with the highest share of Latinos was San Antonio-New Braunfels, Texas. Over 61 percent of Latino people lived in metropolitan suburbs.

Non-Hispanic White Americans made up about 59 percent of the overall population in 2020 based on Census data. They predominantly lived in the northern part of the country, though they remained the majority throughout most of the country: in all but six states (Maryland, Nevada, Texas, New Mexico, California, and Hawaii), more than half the residents considered themselves White alone, not Hispanic or Latino.

Asian Americans encompass both descendants of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century immigrants (primarily Japanese and Chinese) as well as newcomers from nations that, until the late twentieth century, were not represented among the Asian American population (including Vietnamese, and Southeast Asians). In 2020, 62 percent of Asian Americans were suburban. Most were residents of Hawaii, California, Washington, New Jersey, or New York. Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders (mostly Samoan and Guamanian immigrants) mainly lived along the West Coast and in the Southwest.

As of the 2020 US Census, Oklahoma, Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas were collectively home to about half of the American Indigenous population. About 13 percent of American Indigenous and Alaska Natives lived on reservations or other trust lands, while about 60 percent lived in metro areas. However, there is substantial movement to and from reservations. Indigenous people often have not made up a sufficiently large population to establish enclaves, so most have resided in heterogeneous working-class urban neighborhoods. Movement to the city has historically been for economic reasons; returning to the reservation is often precipitated by loss of employment or to secure healthcare from the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ Indian Health Service. For many, reservation life involves overcrowded conditions, substandard housing, and lack of adequate sanitation. Government housing and mortgage programs administered by some tribes have made it easier for new home building and home improvements, and income from gambling has promised to do more, but many are simply too poor to consider new housing, even with the help of these agencies. Moreover, individuals typically cannot qualify for mortgages because tribal lands held in trust cannot be used as collateral.

Causes of Residential Segregation

Waves of African American migrants have left the South since the early 1900s. Following World War II, a massive migration of Black people to the industrial centers of the Northeast, Midwest, and West resulted from the industrialization of southern agriculture, which displaced many tenant farmers and sharecroppers. Also, Black veterans returning to the United States after World War II, having visited other areas of the country while in the military, were attracted to the job opportunities in northern factories. Consequently, in several of these cities, the numbers of African Americans doubled between 1950 and 1970.

Many strategies were employed by White residents to discourage newcomers of color from moving into White residential areas, contributing to the maintenance of residential racial segregation. History records instances of violence and other acts of intimidation in order to discourage perceived intrusions into White neighborhoods. Restrictive covenants added to property deeds were employed in order to prevent the sale of housing to minorities. In some cohesive communities, researchers have found sales and rentals of residences conducted by means of informal communications in order to avoid the use of public advertising that might result in minority applicants. Slum clearance and public housing construction in the inner city have contributed to a concentration of minority residences. Following World War II, suburbanization, stimulated by the construction of housing developments, federally guaranteed mortgages for (mainly White) veterans, and new highways, contributed to White flight from cities, further segregating racial-ethnic groups from one another. Court-mandated school busing and Black migration to cities contributed to White flight as well. Banks in many areas adopted the practice of “redlining,” which resulted in the denial of mortgage loans to prospective buyers of homes in designated areas, usually racially transitional ones. Though illegal, the practice intensified the Black concentration in central city areas.

Although some have suggested that Black preferences are the root cause of residential segregation, survey evidence has repeatedly indicated a preference for racially mixed neighborhoods. Similar studies among White Americans indicate increased White tolerance of Black residents living in the same neighborhoods so long as Black residents represent a numerical minority.

Social scientists have offered a variety of perspectives explaining the reasons for the persistence of residential segregation. Some theorists hold that the welfare system dulls incentives for minorities and the poor in general. The idea is that the supposed predictability in subsistence provided by a monthly welfare check results in laziness and a lessened ambition to improve one’s lot in life. Life becomes stagnant, as do the segregated neighborhoods in which these people reside.

The “culture of poverty” view, exemplified by the writings of anthropologist Oscar Lewis, holds that poverty conditions result in a general perspective that includes psychological depression and a view of life devoid of any hope of ever extricating oneself from one’s predicament. A fatalism and the feeling that any efforts to improve one’s life are doomed to failure result in a cycle of poverty that continues from generation to generation.

The institutional racism perspective attributes segregation to factors inherent in the institutions serving the poor in the inner city. Deteriorating, aging schools with inexperienced teachers lacking insight into inner-city life, a political institution concerned with serving other populations in the society that are more likely to vote, an urban economy that no longer provides a living wage as low-paying service employment has replaced manufacturing jobs, and increased unemployment as jobs migrate to the suburbs have left the Black population behind as society has changed. Other factors such as disparate treatment in the criminal justice system have been cited as well.

Sociologist William Julius Wilson holds the view that the upward social mobility experienced by middle-class Black Americans as a consequence of the civil rights revolution resulted in community leaders moving out of poor inner-city neighborhoods. This development, coupled with changes in the economy that reduced employment opportunities in the central cities, leaves the poor who have not benefited from civil rights advances behind in increasingly deteriorating areas abandoned by many community businesses. The result is a racially homogeneous neighborhood characterized by crime, drug use, births outside of marriage, and other conditions characteristic of the underclass syndrome.

Patterns of Residential Segregation

The ethnic segregation experienced by the European immigrants of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a transient phenomenon. Due to financial limitations and the psychological comfort of familiar cultural surroundings, they formed ethnic enclaves in central cities. With cultural assimilation attained through education and upward social mobility, as well as changing government policies, later generations attained “respectable” middle-class occupations.

Research by Nancy Denton and Douglas Massey in the late 1980s on ethnic and racial minorities indicated that this scenario has not occurred for all groups. Unlike advances made by African Americans in education and the workplace, residential segregation appeared to be a relatively permanent condition of life for a large majority of Black people. This was true across social class lines. Tract data from US censuses were used in calculating an index of dissimilarity, a statistical indicator of the proportion of the minority population that would have to move its census tract residence in order for proportional residential “evenness” or integration to occur. The researchers used data from sixty metropolitan areas that contained the largest populations of Black people, Latinos (termed Hispanics), and Asian people.

Denton and Massey’s findings indicated that for the twenty metropolitan areas containing the largest Black populations, residential segregation from White Americans was high regardless of Black social class. Social class was measured using income, education, and occupational status, each of which was examined independently. Segregation indexes declined for Black people of higher social class but remained high. Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago exhibited the highest degree of Black/White residential segregation; Washington, DC, and San Francisco, the lowest. The authors pointed out that unlike earlier European immigrants who lived in relatively heterogeneous neighborhoods, an overwhelming majority of African Americans live in racially homogeneous neighborhoods. This segregation has been relatively impervious to advances in social mobility and has not been transitory. Federal efforts such as the Fair Housing Act of 1968, an outgrowth of the urban disorders of the 1960s, have had little impact on this phenomenon.

Significantly smaller proportions of Black people than Hispanic and Asian people lived in suburbs. Data indicated that suburban Black residents received somewhat higher incomes than those residing in the inner city. The degree of residential racial segregation experienced by African Americans across class lines indicated that a high proportion of the Black middle class in the suburbs lived under segregated conditions, as did their urban counterparts.

For Hispanic people, the index of dissimilarity was moderate, even for those in the lowest categories of social class. For US-born Hispanic people, descendants of immigrants (for research purposes, Puerto Ricans are treated as immigrants, although they are US citizens), the segregation index declined with upward social mobility. For Latinos, in fact, increased education resulted in sharp declines in segregation, indicating a general acceptance by non-Hispanic Whites of middle-class Latinos as neighbors. This decline was particularly true in Miami, where the Latino population was predominantly Cuban American and light-skinned, and in Los Angeles, where the great majority of Latinos were of Mexican ancestry. This was less the case in New York City and Newark, New Jersey, where the majority of Hispanic people were of Puerto Rican descent. This Hispanic population was more segregated from White Americans than from African Americans. Puerto Ricans are the only one of the few Hispanic populations with significant, readily identifiable African ancestry; this may indicate that they are experiencing color prejudice, consistent with the findings for African Americans.

Federal housing studies of the residential accommodations of Black Americans and Latinos produced findings consistent with those groups’ lower socioeconomic status. In contrast with medians for the total US population, these groups inhabited smaller living quarters, shared fewer square feet per person, were less likely to have air conditioning, lived in homes that were more likely to be older, and lived in areas with streets or roads that were more likely to be in need of repair. Respondents from both minorities rated their neighborhoods lower as environments in which to live.

A 2023 Eviction Lab analysis of court records and census data for thirty-four major metro areas revealed that non-Hispanic Black renters in the late 2000s through mid-2010s were also disproportionately evicted or threatened with eviction each year. Black mothers of children under eighteen were the most likely to be evicted. The researchers also noted that the numbers of Latinos facing eviction were likely undercounts because of the high number of undocumented Latinos living in the country and lack of records for informal evictions taking place outside the court system. Childhood evictions have been linked with food insecurity, health problems, and difficulty in school, thus potentially affecting members of these racial-ethnic groups for life.

Asian Americans (including Pacific Islanders) experienced reduced segregation with attainment of higher-class status. Middle-class Asian Americans appeared to be undergoing a minority immigration experience not unlike that of the European immigrants who arrived near the beginning of the twentieth century, although they did not seem to be forming ethnic enclaves to the same extent as the European immigrants did. Most lived in ethnically heterogeneous neighborhoods. In general, the dominant White population did not appear to object to sharing communities with upwardly mobile Asian Americans.

Consequences of Residential Segregation

In addition to exacerbating such inner-city problems as poor schools, crime, and illegal drug use, residential segregation serves to limit communication between groups and, thus, precludes cooperation between populations in solving common problems. Separation promotes distrust, feelings of hostility, and occasionally open conflict. African Americans have been segregated not only from White Americans but also from Asian Americans and most Latino/Hispanic Americans. For African Americans, attainment of higher education and other criteria of middle-class status do not readily translate into either acceptance as neighbors by the dominant White residents. As a result, even educated and relatively well-off African Americans may stay in poorer, predominantly Black neighborhoods, where their children must attend underfunded schools. Furthermore, homogeneous Black neighborhoods are often perceived by political and economic powers as areas that can be sacrificed when new roads are to be built or when undesirable municipal facilities are to be erected. The limited success African Americans have had in rising in socioeconomic status divides the dominant Whites from the largest US racial or ethnic minority and breeds continual intergroup tensions.

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