Inside Business

Segregation remains high, study shows

A report from the Demographics & Workforce Group detailed economic and educational strides among black Virginians - as well as disparities that still exist between them and their white counterparts.


The group, which published "Blacks in Virginia," is a part of the University of Virginia's Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service.

On the topic of residential segregation, the report highlighted Virginia's largest metropolitan areas: the Washington-Arlington-Alexandria metro area, the Richmond metro area, and the Virginia Beach-Norfolk-Newport News metro area, which together account for more than three-quarters of the black population in the state.


In the report, residential segregation among the metro areas was measured by the "dissimilarity index," which "captures how evenly blacks and whites are distributed throughout neighborhoods within an area."

Among the three metro areas, the Virginia Beach-Norfolk-Newport News metro area was found to have the least disproportionately segregated neighborhoods, with a dissimilarity value of 48.

"A dissimilarity value of 0 means that blacks and whites are found in every neighborhood in proportions equal to their overall proportion in the locality, while a dissimilarity value of 100 means that blacks and whites live in completely separate neighborhoods, with blacks living in all-black areas and whites living in all-white areas," said the report, defining the index scale.

"A dissimilarity value of 50 means that half of the blacks (or half of the whites) in a locality would need to move to another neighborhood to produce a proportional distribution."

Of the three largest metro areas in Virginia, the Washington-Arlington-Alexandria metro area had the highest dissimilarity index in 2010, at 62. The Richmond metro area scored 52 that year.

The report also noted that neighborhood racial segregation had declined, most notably in the Hampton Roads MSA, since the passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Prior to the late '60s, the Norfolk-Virginia Beach-Newport News MSA was the most segregated of the three metro areas.

"While still high, Virginia's metro areas are near 55, the average measure of residential segregation across the 100 largest U.S. metropolitan areas," the report said.

In the "Blacks in Virginia" April report, crucial findings pertaining to the black populations' status, Virginia's largest minority group, included:


* Black Virginians continue to be concentrated in the southern and eastern portions of the state, a pattern established during Virginia's pre-Civil War history.

* Rates of residential racial segregation in Virginia's large metropolitan areas remain high, with little change in the last two decades.

* Despite gains in education, blacks still lag far behind the educational attainment of whites.

* The household income of blacks continues to trail significantly behind that of whites, despite absolute gains; and a significant differential income is found even among blacks and whites with the same level of education and number of hours worked.

* On additional metrics of economic well-being - unemployment, home ownership, and poverty - black Virginians remain consistently worse off than white Virginians.

"Because these differences are, in part, a reflection of long-standing structural inequalities - in housing markets, access to education, employment opportunities, and government policies - they are stubbornly resistant to change; and the impact of continuing discrimination cannot be discounted," the report said.


"At the same time, black Virginians' achievements of steady absolute increases in earned degrees, income and residential integration serve as countervailing forces and a foundation for future progress."