Our region is among the most economically segregated in the US
Image by Photocapy licensed under Creative Commons.
Among the US' most populous regions, Washington is one of the most economically segregated. It's slightly less segregated when it comes to black and white people, and is in the middle of the pack when you look at Latino and white people. When segregation levels go down, education levels and safety increase and life expectancies lengthen.
In a recent study, authors from the Urban Institute rank US metro areas by their levels of racial and economic segregation and assess how that impacts communities. This is certainly not the first attempt to quantify segregation in urban areas, but its inclusion of segregation levels based off of income and race is quite interesting.
In order to quantify segregation, the study measured the tendency of certain income groups and races to live in homogenous neighborhoods. Neighborhoods with households of different income were much more common in the 1970s than they are today, the study concludes.
Among the three areas the authors looked at:
- Of 100 places ranked, we were the 17th most segregated.
- Washington ranks 34th in black-white segregation
- Washington ranks 49th in Hispanic-white segregation.
Image by Urban Institute used with permission.
Washington is slightly more economically segregated than neighboring metro areas, such as Baltimore and Richmond, but less than New York, San Francisco, and Philadelphia.
Places that are heavily economically segregated are not necessarily heavily racially segregated, nor vice versa, but the authors of the study posit that racial segregation has serious economic effects. Among the benefits, according to Mark Treskon, one of the study's authors:
More economically inclusive regions have higher black per capita [income] and black median household income.
More racially inclusive regions with lower levels of black-white segregation have higher black median household income, higher bachelor’s degree attainment for both blacks and whites, and lower homicide rates.
Regions with lower levels of Latino-white segregation have higher overall life expectancy.
The level of economic segregation in DC — the metric where our region scored the worst — declined in the 1990s, but this progress has stagnated since 2000.
What more can our community do to desegregate the region?