Census: Urban integration on the rise

WASHINGTON -- America's metropolitan areas became more integrated during the 1990s, particularly renovated inner cities that attracted whites from suburbia and immigrants from abroad, the Census Bureau reported Wednesday.

Projects such as Jacobs Field and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Baltimore's Inner Harbor and the arts district in Denver have encouraged downtown redevelopment. In many cases, developers are turning old factories into condominiums or erecting new housing on vacant downtown land.

The projects are attracting higher-income whites from the suburbs, single young professionals and married couples with no children or whose children have grown up and moved out, experts said.

"A lot of cities have made as a policy priority getting housing opportunities in the downtown area and creating more diverse downtowns," said Doug Peterson, a senior policy analyst with the National League of Cities.

"The yuppies want it because it's close to the theaters and trendy bars, and you're also trying to create opportunities for people who work downtown in lower-paid jobs," he said. "That's what cities have been talking about for two decades."

Faster-growing cities, primarily those in the West and South, were more diverse. The Census Bureau said the five most integrated urban areas were Orange County, Calif.; San Jose, Calif.; Norfolk, Va.; Tampa; and San Diego.

Also bringing integration to inner cities is the influx of immigrants, especially Hispanics and Eastern Europeans, retracing the steps of earlier generations of new arrivals to the United States.

Even so, many areas remain highly segregated, the bureau said, with blacks more isolated than other ethnic or racial groups.

"It's progress that for a second decade in a row we're seeing a modest decline" in segregation, said Margery Turner, director of the Metropolitan Housing and Communities Center at the Urban Institute, a Washington think tank. "But it's important, while recognizing that decline, to also recognize how much segregation remains."

The black population increased from 26.5-million in 1980, or 11.7 percent of all Americans, to 36.4-million, or 12.9 percent, in 2000, according to the Census Bureau.

The Census Bureau report did not provide an estimate of how many blacks live in segregated communities. Instead, it used a series of formulas to produce a segregation index. For blacks, the index fell roughly 12 percent from 1980 to 2000.

The bureau said the five most segregated metropolitan areas were Milwaukee, Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis and Newark, N.J.

John Logan, director of the Lewis Mumford Center at the University of Albany, N.Y., said blacks moved into those cities in the 1920s, when laws enforced segregation.

"That established a pattern of segregation that has proved durable," said Logan, whose center studies urban issues. "The patterns are being reproduced in the suburbs. It's not just that the old city ghettos have been maintained but a tradition of segregation was established and is being re-created in the present."

A recent study by the Mumford Center, based on census data, determined the average white lives in a neighborhood that is 80 percent white, down from 88 percent in 1980, while the average black lives in a neighborhood that is 33 percent white, up from 30 percent.

Antidiscrimination laws have made it easier for blacks and other minorities to move out of central cities and buy homes in suburbia or in neighborhoods away from the central city, Turner said.

Robert Lang, director of the Virginia Tech Metropolitan Institute in Alexandria, Va., said the last two decades reversed an exodus of people from cities.

"If you looked at the 1970s, it was just one direction: Everything was out," Lang said. "While the pattern is still mostly out, you finally have enough of a countermovement. Cities can redevelop at the same time you can have a suburban boom."

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