Detroit most segregated city in US

Charles Brown CharlesB at CNCL.ci.detroit.mi.us
Thu May 10 11:53:19 PDT 2001



>>> westrich at miser.umass.edu 05/10/01 01:31PM >>>

I apologize for linking to a press report in my post yesterday when the full report, tables, and spreadsheets are all freely (and generously available from the Mumford Center http://www.albany.edu/mumford/census/ ).

)))))))))

CB: Thanks

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At 12:40 PM 5/10/01, Charles Brown wrote:
>Detroit is not a segragated city inside Detroit. The minority of whites
>who live in Detroit are not residentially segregated from the Black
>majority. However, Detroit has an large majority Black population (80%) ,
>and Detroit's majority white suburbs are racially segregated from Detroit.

Detroit has an African-American population of 71.4% according to the 2000 U. S. census. It is the 4th "blackest" city in the USA. (Benton Harbor, Birmingham, and one I forget have a higher percentage of African-Americans.

While it is true that the dissimilarity analysis found that Detroit is the most segregated area (city and suburbs) in the U. S., if you look at cities alone Detroit comes in around 16th using my calculation (I could not find their overall city ranking in my browsing the site). Their dissimilarity index as a city alone is still very high. Dissimilarity is measured by the difference between the overall racial breakdown of the city/area with the individual census tracts.

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CB: I'm trying to think how they draw the census tracts and whether if drawn differently , there would be a different result.

What about all the cities with very small %'s of Black people ? Aren't they often very segregated almost automatically by the fact that most of the whites can't live near many Blacks ?

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>Thread title would be more accurately most racially segregated
>metropolitan area.

Charles is correct here but I would still include "one of the most segregated cities" to that as well.

Peace,

Jim

"Imagine my wish for a future that cannot hold my wish."

--Paul Heaton



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