Urban Racial Segregation Increasing, Report Says

Despite growing minority populations in the Boston metropolitan area and in the city itself, the greater Boston area is becoming even more segregated, according to a report released last week by the Harvard Civil Rights Project (CRP).

Whites are moving out of Boston and neighboring suburbs like Lowell and Somerville to remote suburbs like Franklin and Plymouth, the report says, creating what CRP researcher Nancy A. McArdle calls a “doughnut effect.”

“The whites move to the edges of suburbs or stay in the central city. Minorities are stuck in the middle areas,” she said.

The report, which is one of the first major analyses of the change in racial demographics based on the 2000 national census results, finds that this increased segregation comes even as Boston has become “majority-minority,” with minorities comprising more than 50 percent of the city’s population.

The greater Boston area, though, remains predominantly white. While the migration of whites to more distant suburbs has increased the suburban white population by a total of 90,000—making Boston suburbs overall 90 percent white—the report finds that Asians have moved into the suburbs in greater numbers than other minorities.

“Asian growth has doubled in the last 10 years. They’re really booming in the middle suburbs,” McArdle said, noting that rates of segregation differ within the Asian population itself. Chinese and Indians constitute the largest Asian groups in the middle suburbs.

But while Asians are experiencing the most integration in suburbs, Latino populations are experiencing the most growth in segregation overall, McArdle said.

“Forty-one percent of Latinos would have to move from their communities for neighborhoods to be completely integrated,” she said.

The Boston area’s black population, however, is experiencing the highest level of segregation. Seventy percent would have to move to be integrated. But McArdle noted that this percentage is an improvement from the 75 percent predicted by the 1990 census.

CRP Co-director Gary A. Orfield, professor of education and social policy at Harvard Law School, said dismantling desegregation programs in public education in the face of increasing segregation will hurt growing minority populations.

“Minority kids are going to be isolated and they’re going to be in inferior schools,” Orfield wrote in the report’s conclusion.

“If you look at the MCAS, the results relate to patterns of race,” he said, referring to the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System, a mandatory set of standardized tests. “If you look at employment, wealth growing, health, it all relates to race.”

Panelists who helped present the report agreed that greater political participation is needed to deal with segregation.

“We know demographics are changing,” said Leonard Atkins, president of the Boston Chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. “Only when we resolve the voting problem will we resolve the policy decisions that affect segregation.”

“There are no surprises in this report,” said Dorca I. De Gomez, chair of Massachusetts’ Commission Against Discrimination. “In 2001, for the first time ever, race was the number one complaint in [the Commission Against Discrimination].”

The panelists said problems like predatory lending and “snob-zoning” ordinances could be resolved by legislation.

The Kennedy School of Government and commUNITY 2000, a non-profit collaborative group that works on race-related housing issues, contributed to the report. The report also examines contemporary segregation in Chicago and San Diego.

—Staff writer Katherine M. Dimengo can be reached at dimengo@fas.harvard.edu.