The Diverging Paths of Black-White Segregation in Urban America, 1970–1990

Measures of Black-White housing segregation show striking uniformity across metropolitan areas in 1970 and very uneven—sometimes quite large—declines in the 1970s and 1980s. We argue that after 1970, Black households were more likely to move into neighborhoods far from existing Black enclaves and that when they did so in substantial numbers, metropolitan-level segregation declined significantly. We further argue that the volume of Black migration to outlying areas depended on a few key demographic characteristics of metropolitan areas—hence, the variation across these areas in the rate of desegregation. Using internal census data at the household, census-tract, and metropolitan levels, we show that framing desegregation as an interrelated process of intra- and intermetropolitan migration flows and demographic structural constraints can account for changes in Black-White residential dissimilarity during the time period from 1970 to 1990 with considerable precision. Our analysis also sheds new light on the likely role of national fair housing policies in changing Black residential patterns.