Shifting Geographies: Examining the Role of Suburbanization in Black’s Declining Segregation

Mary J. Fischer, University of Connecticut

This paper explores the relationship between black shifts to the suburbs and metropolitan segregation using the entropy index, which allows segregation to be decomposed into parts accounted for within suburb, within city, and between suburb and city components. I find that much of the decline in metropolitan segregation of blacks from others is due to declining central city segregation; suburban segregation has much lower average declines. Furthermore, a growing proportion of black/other segregation is explained by residential distributions within the suburbs. Uneven distributions of blacks across city lines account for nearly a third of black/other segregation in Midwest and Northeast in 2000. In the West, within suburban sorting is by far the most important component of metropolitan segregation of blacks from others, while in the South within city and within suburb sorting are relatively equal in importance.