Shifting Geographies

Abstract

This article explores the relationship between Black shifts to the suburbs and metropolitan segregation using the decompositional properties of the entropy index. This method reveals that much of the decline in metropolitan segregation of Blacks from others is because of 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 the 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 sorting and within-suburb sorting are relatively equal in importance.