 The U.S. is growing more ethnically and racially diverse with each passing year, but according to new research by the University of California at Berkeley, it's also growing more segregated. Berkeley researchers analyzed census data and discovered that 81% of metropolitan areas with more than 200,000 people were more racially segregated in 2019 than they were in 1990. Household incomes and home values are nearly twice as high in White neighborhoods. The few Black and Latino children raised in these more affluent White neighborhoods have access to better schools and earn between $4,000 and $5,000 more per year as adults than those raised in segregated neighborhoods of color.  Rustbelt cities of the industrial Midwest and mid-Atlantic disproportionately make up the top 10 most segregated cities list, which includes Detroit (pictured above) Cleveland, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Trenton. Photographer: Jeff Kowalsky/Jeff Kowalsky "Housing is the locus of opportunity," says Stephen Menendian, the director of research at Berkeley's Othering and Belonging Institute, who oversaw the project. "Where you live determines what schools your children attend, the quality and safety of your streets, if you have safe drinking water, access to amenities, jobs. Your life is essentially gerrymandered based on where you live." Decades of anti-discrimination laws haven't done much to change this. Eighty-three percent of neighborhoods redlined in the 1930s are still highly segregated communities of color today. The researchers don't say why segregation has worsened, but Menendian theorizes that it's because historically White enclaves such as Walnut Creek in the Bay Area have resisted integration even as the surrounding region has grown more diverse. "It's not outright racial bigotry the way it was in the 1950s, where a Black kid would get in a public pool and white parents would pull their kids out of the pool," says Menendian. "If Barack Obama or Oprah moved into a historically White neighborhood, White people would be fine with it. What they don't want is an influx of low-income people of color. So they fight back in the self-interest of their kids' schools, their property values. But by acting in their own self-interest, they're making racial disparities worse." What should cities do? "You have to change the incentives for White people," Menendian says. "Unless cities make aconcerted effort at integration it's not going to happen." - Claire Suddath | 
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