NEW YORK - More than 40 years after the federal government enacted fair-housing legislation and the Great Migration of blacks from the South began to ebb, residential segregation in metropolitan America has been significantly curtailed, according to a study released yesterday.
The study of census results from thousands of neighborhoods by two economics professors who are fellows at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative research organization, found that the nation’s cities are more racially integrated than at any time since 1910; that all-white enclaves “are effectively extinct’’; and that while black urban ghettos still exist, they are shriveling.
An influx of immigrants and the gentrification of black neighborhoods contributed to the change, the study said, but suburbanization by blacks was even more instrumental.
The progress was less pronounced between blacks and non-Hispanic whites, though, than it has been between blacks and other ethnicities, including Asians and Hispanics.
The findings by Edward Glaeser of Harvard and Jacob L. Vigdor of Duke were generally seconded by a spectrum of other experts with several caveats and an admonition that the study should not be seen as declaring the end of all segregation.
Also, barriers like exclusionary zoning in the suburbs persist, and the decline in busing to achieve racial integration means that some public schools are more segregated than before.
“There is now very much more black-white neighborhood integration than 40 years ago,’’ said professor Reynolds Farley of the University of Michigan’s Population Studies Center. “Those of us who worked on segregation in the 1960s never anticipated such declines. Nevertheless, blacks remain considerably more segregated from whites than do Hispanics or Asians.’’
Douglas Massey, a Princeton sociologist, said, “In terms of trends in black-white segregation, we really see two trends: In metro areas with small black populations, we indeed observed sharp decreases in segregation; but in those with large black populations, the declines are much slower and at times nonexistent. Although all white neighborhoods have largely disappeared, this is more due to the entry of Latinos and Asians into formerly all-white neighborhoods.’’
John R. Logan, a Brown sociologist, said, “If we want to understand the long-term trends in segregation, we have to be aware both of the progress and of the resistance to change. We are far from the ‘end of segregation.’ ’’
Still, Glaeser and Vigdor found that only 20 percent of blacks now live in “ghetto’’ neighborhoods where 80 percent of the population or more is black, compared with nearly 50 percent who lived in similar neighborhoods a half-century ago.
The findings in the report, titled “The End of the Segregated Century,’’ for the Manhattan Institute’s Center for State and Local Leadership did not denigrate decades of desegregation efforts. In fact, the authors said, “there is every reason to relish the fact that there is more freedom in housing today than 50 years ago and to applaud those who fought to create the change.’’ But they concluded that housing desegregation was not a magic bullet in providing equal opportunity.
“Residential segregation has declined pervasively, as ghettos depopulate and the nation’s population center shifts toward the less segregated Sun Belt,’’ Glaeser and Vigdor wrote. “At the same time, there has been only limited progress in closing achievement and employment gaps between blacks and whites.’’
While the decline in New York and St. Louis was “not very profound,’’ Vigdor said, new neighborhoods like the Washington Navy Yard in the District of Columbia shifted to 31 percent black in 2010 from 95 percent black in 2000.
