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March 28, 1998
Consequences and Challenges of
the New Demography of Suburban Diversity
After the Gavel Falls: Race,
Community Politics, and Suburban Housing
Xavier de Souza Briggs and Robin A. Lenhardt
This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of the Fair
Housing Act. Though we know from the experiences of the last three
decades that discrimination accounts for much of the growth of racially
isolated communities, we have very little insight into why this
is so or how local efforts to limit equal housing opportunities
manage to be successful. The better part of the research conducted
in this area has focused on the impact of discrimination on individuals
or the strategies courts employ for dealing with discrimination,
but devoted scant attention to the complex political processes that
do so much, "after the gavel falls," to render courts
effective or ineffective agents of change.
Our goal in this project is to begin to close, in
some measure, this research gap. Starting with the premise that
courts are "constrained innovators," limited in their
ability to alter behavior or attitudes, we consider the community-level
dynamics that determine whether judicial decrees can achieve their
intended effect. We identify the newest wave of effort to thwart
court orders and settle cases and develop programs that increase
the range of suburban housing opportunities available to low-income
people of color. And, using several highly contested legal battles
as our central cases, we ask three questions: (1) Who are the key
actors in the local "gaming" of fair housing orders, what
are their powers, and what are their interests?, (2) What distinct
patterns ensue "after the gavel falls,"?, and (3) What
do the political interests and processes at play in this context
suggest about the way lawyers, judges, planners, community leaders,
and others should work, if equal housing opportunity is the aim?
Utilizing the three research questions and several housing desegregation
cases as a jumping-off point, the paper will explore what happens
"after the gavel falls" in housing desegregation cases.
Diversity-Winners and Diversity-Losers
Don DeMarco and Rufus Sylvester Lynch
From a pro-integrative perspective, the authors argue
that suburban communities experiencing racial change, not unlike
the urban neighborhoods which are typically close by, experience
change in recognizable stages; these stages typically lead to resegregation
and only occasionally to the lasting integration which arguably
would have been possible if their suburban advantages had been harnessed
to intentionally sustain and enhance robust, racially inclusive
demand for living in such suburbs. The authors identify key decision
points, outline the requisites for the pro-integrative scenario
as well as obstacles which would need to be negotiated if a suburban
community is to be a diversity-winner.
Suburban Racial and Ethnic
Change at the Neighborhood Level: The Declining Number of All-White
Neighborhoods
Nancy A. Denton and Richard D. Alba
Previous research has documented that the pace of
race-ethnic integration of the suburbs has been slow and the possibility
of re-segregation of neighborhoods not insignificant, particularly
if African Americans are involved. At the same time, the decade
of the 1980’s witnessed tremendous growth in the proportion
of the suburban population that was Hispanic or non-white, albeit
from a low base in many metropolitan areas. In this paper we examine
the process of suburban integration by focussing on the decline
in the number of all-white neighborhoods. Using matched census tract
data from the 1970-1990 Censuses from the 50 largest CMSA/PMSAs
in the U.S., we measure the neighborhood isolation of the non-Hispanic
white population from four groups: all others, non-Hispanic Blacks,
Asians and Hispanics. We then trace the number of "all-white"
neighborhoods across the three censuses, showing the magnitude of
the declines in their number as well as selected socioeconomic characteristics
of the neighborhoods themselves. A model of the process of decline
in the number of all-white neighborhoods as a function of metropolitan
area characteristics reveals the importance of new immigrants to
suburban race/ethnic change.
Changing Suburban Demographics:
Beyond the Black-White, City-Suburb Typology
William Frey
The increased suburban representation and clustering
of minorities, on different socioeconomic dimensions, represent
new challenges to suburban communities and school systems whose
tax bases and services were tailored for a more homogeneous population.
The changes can also spur a new form of "white flight"
between suburban communities or to the exurbs. Yet, policy makers
should be aware that these changing suburban demographics will vary
sharply across different parts of the country so that one size fits
all" solutions cannot be adopted. This paper offers a typology
of suburban racial change in the suburbs of the nation’s largest
metropolitan areas, with populations over one million, and is grounded
in our earlier work. Drawing on data from decennial censuses and
post-1990 estimates, we show how the race and socioeconomic profiles
of suburban populations differ across different types of metropolitan
areas. Because the changing racial profiles of the suburban school-aged
populations is of particular interest, special attention will be
given to the demographics of children, and household types.
The first part of the paper will focus on metropolitan-area
differences in the entire suburban populations for three classes
of metropolitan areas: (1) high immigration, multi-ethnic metropolitan
areas; (2) growing, mostly white or white, black areas; (3) slow-growing
or declining areas. We present descriptive statistics as these individual
areas’ changing suburban profiles with respect to race-ethnicity,
socioeconomic status measures by race, household type and child
population by race. The second part will focus on three selected
metropolitan areas representing each of the above groups: (1) Los
Angeles; (2) Atlanta; (3) Detroit. The final portion of the paper
will discuss the potential utility and elaboration of this typology
as a means of shaping further research and policy directives.
Crossing the Line: Poverty
in the Suburbs
Paul Jargowsky
Ghettos, barrios, and slums are usually associated
with the central cities of large metropolitan areas. Indeed, the
phrase "the inner city" is often used as a short hand
way of referring to high-poverty neighborhoods. In recent years,
however, the phenomenon of urban blight is increasingly being seen
in suburbs, at least in the older group of suburbs sometimes referred
to as the "inner-ring suburbs."
In 1990, 8.4 million persons lived in high-poverty
census tracts in metropolitan areas. More than 10 percent of these
persons (870,000) did not live in central cities. In particular,
the white concentrated poor are much more likely to live in a suburban
setting than the black concentrated poor. While 17 percent of the
white poor living in high-poverty neighborhoods were outside the
central cities, only 6 percent of the black poor in high-poverty
neighborhoods were residing in suburban locales.
The expansion of concentrated poverty into the suburbs
is part of a larger trend toward population decentralization and
economic segregation. The inner-ring suburbs are now being undermined
by the same set of forces that caused concentrated poverty to expand
rapidly in the central cities. This paper explores the growth of
neighborhoods of concentrated in the suburbs, and examines their
growth over time. In particular, this paper examines the differences
in social, economic, and housing characteristics of suburban slums
compared to inner-city high-poverty neighborhoods.
Minority Students and Texas
Metropolitan Areas: The Impact of Suburbanization
John Kain and Daniel O’Brien
[no abstract available]
Racial Change in Fairfax County,
Virginia and Its Implications for Public Education
Jimmy Kim
This paper will describe and analyze the rapid racial
change that has altered the demographic profile of one of the most
affluent counties in the United States. Since 1980, Fairfax County
has become a multiracial society, which belies enduring stereotypes
of suburbs as racially homogenous, residential communities. Today,
Fairfax County faces enormous challenges as income disparities between
rich and poor widen, and as more and more nonwhites settle in communities
throughout Fairfax that are declining economically. Specifically,
this paper will examine socio-economic trends in Fairfax County,
how these trends affect educational opportunities for nonwhites,
and why school integration should embrace a multiracial paradigm.
Nonwhites will soon comprise a majority in Fairfax County’s
public schools. Such demographic changes have become increasingly
common in metropolitan school districts around the nation. Therefore,
what happens in Fairfax will provide a useful case study of how
multiracial school systems can ensure equal educational opportunity
for all students.
The Costs of Exclusion: Black
Exposure to Violent Crime in the Suburbs
John R. Logan, Department of Sociology, SUNY Albany
It is well known by now that suburban blacks tend
to be segregated into older, poorer, and less desirable communities
in the suburban ring, and into communities with higher crime rates.
New research demonstrates that the strong association between violent
crime rates and black population size in suburbs is due to two small
and self-reinforcing effects: places with larger black populations
tend to have increasing crime over time, and places with higher
crime tend to lose white residents and gain blacks. This happens
because blacks have less choice than whites in the housing market.
In fact, even after controlling for income and other personal characteristics,
blacks live in suburbs with higher crime rates than do comparable
whites. The cost of racial exclusion for suburban blacks is greater
exposure to violent crime.
Metropolitan Government and
the Social Ecology of Minority Residential Distribution: The Experience
of Metro Toronto
William Michelson
For 45 years until December 31, 1997, the metropolitan
government of Toronto was a structure of municipal governance which
divided control and financing of urban functions into two tiers:
a lower level of constituent municipalities and an upper level called
The Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto. The lower level governments
were to deal with idiosyncratic, largely local functions, while
the upper level "Metro" government was to deal with functions
requiring coordination and redistribution. This system provided
for the establishment of a comprehensive system of physical and
transportation infrastructure, which, when combined with strict
planning restrictions against unbridled residential development
outside Metro boundaries, fostered rapid and thoroughgoing residential
construction in municipalities inside Metro but outside the central
City of Toronto to meet the needs of newly-formed households, expanding
families, in-migrants, and, particularly, immigrants. The heated
housing market led to an escalation of land-values, resulting in
great numbers of multiple-family, often high-rise, apartments in
"suburban" municipalities. One result is that the economic
and ethnic/racial composition of the population is diverse not only
in the central city but also in the constituent suburban municipalities.
While deterministic segregating mechanisms are not common, subgroup
concentrations have occurred but are not strong. Applying an index
of decentralization to census data shows that ethnic minorities
have suburbanized to the same degree or more than what was once
the majority group. Furthermore, visible minorities have decentralized
to an equal degree and do not show the same levels of segregation
as has been the case in the United States. The most segregated group
is a relatively affluent, white group in Toronto, which formally
reinforces the identity of local areas.
This paper traces the impact of the Metro experiment,
on the residential distribution of ethnic/racial minorities. It
traces the relationship of governance to settlement patterns over
the years 1951-1991. It raises the further question of macro factors
which mediate the impacts of metropolitan-level government.
The Myth of the Suburban Monolith:
Economic and Racial Polarization In Suburban School Districts
Myron Orfield
There is a rapid racial and social transformation
occurring in the older fully-developed suburbs of U.S. metropolitan
areas. As problems such as racial segregation, white flight, and
fiscal decline – trends that brought down central cities and
urban school systems – spread to these communities, they accelerate
and intensify. Moreover, the other suburbs of a region are by no
means monolithic. At the edge of metropolitan regions, some school
districts develop rapidly without sufficient fiscal capacity to
provide for adequate instruction or facilities. On the other hand,
a very small percentage of students attend school districts with
strong fiscal capacity. In the end, minority families suburbanize
in declining suburbs on the opposite side of the region from economic
growth and new jobs. In terms of remedy, strategies such as vouchers,
ending school integration, and even equity funding do not work to
fundamentally stabilize this growing polarization. Real solutions
involve a regional agenda that includes fair housing, land use planning,
tax equity, and more effective and responsive regional governance.
Trends in Racial Diversity
and Segregation in Suburban Public Schools, 1990-1994
Sean F. Reardon and Tamela McNulty Eitle
This study provides a picture of trends in racial
diversity and segregation in suburban public schools during a period
which saw an increase in non-white suburbanization yet reflected
the post-Milliken preservation of suburban school district boundary
lines. The paper uses 1980, 1990, and 1994 data on the racial composition
of schools in 130 metropolitan areas to describe both changing patterns
of racial diversity and segregation in suburban schools and variation
in these patterns among metropolitan areas. It begins with a description
of patterns of racial diversity in suburban public districts and
schools, 1980-94. This includes, as background, a comparison of
suburban diversity to metropolitan area diversity and national diversity.
More importantly, it includes careful description of racial diversity
at an aggregate suburban level, at the district level, and at the
school level. Following this analysis is a description of patterns
of racial segregation in public schools, 1980-94. This begins with
a description of patterns of city/suburban segregation, and then
examines within- and between-district segregation in suburbs, exploring
the extent to which suburban segregation can be attributed to between-
or within-district segregation in the suburbs.
In the final section of the paper, we compare metropolitan
areas controlling for levels of segregation within central city
districts and between these districts and their suburban counterparts.
We find that suburban districts in metropolitan areas with growing
non-white populations have experienced rapid racial change particularly
when the central city district in their metropolitan area is racially
isolated and suffers from high rates of poverty.
Racial and Ethnic Diversity
in City and Suburban Neighborhoods of the Washington Region
Margery Austin Turner
This paper will present a typology of neighborhood
types, based on their poverty rate and racial/ethnic composition.
It will then address three basic questions: 1) how much racial and
ethnic diversity is there in the suburbs? 2) how many people live
in racially diverse neighborhoods in the central city and in the
suburbs? and 3) how do racially diverse neighborhoods in the suburbs
compare to homogeneous (predominantly white) suburban neighborhoods
and to neighborhoods of different types in the central city?
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