The experience of neighborhood diversity

New data from the 2000 Census show that minority children have lower exposure to white children in their neighborhoods now than was true ten years ago. This change results from the concentrated growth of the Asian and Hispanic populations in the Northeast, Sunbelt, and West Coast, as well as from persistent segregation between minorities and whites.

The average white child in metropolitan America now lives in a neighborhood where the under-18 population is 77% white. As the figure on the following page shows, among this child’s neighbors about 8% are black, 10% Hispanic, and 4% Asian. These figures represent an increase in diversity from 1990, when white children’s neighborhood peers were 83% white, with slightly less blacks (6%), Hispanics (7%), or Asians (3%).

But in metropolitan America as a whole, the child population is becoming much more diverse than this. Whites are now only 57% of children, down from 66% ten years ago, while 17% are black, 19% are Hispanic, and 5% are Asian.

Black children on average live in neighborhoods where more than half their peers (56%) are black, only 26% are white, 14% Hispanic, and 3% Asian.

There was tremendous growth in the number of Hispanic children, up nearly four and a half million. They, too, now live in neighborhoods where they are the majority (53%), with only 28% white, 12% black, and 5% Asian.

Though Asian children are greatly outnumbered by the other groups, their number increased by more than a million in the last decade and the average Asian child lives in neighborhoods where they are disproportionately represented (18% Asian).

Children of all groups are being raised in environments where their own group’s size is inflated, and where they are under-exposed to children of other racial and ethnic backgrounds. And if their neighborhoods are segregated in this way, so will be their schools, their clubs, their sports teams, and their friendship networks.