Abstract

Despite civil rights advances, widespread suburbanization and the increased presence of racial/ethnic minorities within the middle class, most U.S. metropolitan areas remain highly segregated residentially. This research provides an analysis of residential segregation in New Orleans, Louisiana, by investigating changes in two dimensions of segregation evident among the four main racial and/or ethnic groups from 1990 to 2000. Measures of residential exposure were decomposed in order to investigate the relative impacts of metropolitan-wide compositional change and intra-urban redistributive change on segregation. During the 1990s, all non-white groups became increasingly segregated from whites and increasingly integrated with one another. Evidence suggests that whites, Hispanics and Asians exhibited some degree of "ethnic (or racial) self-selectivity" that functioned to concentrate these groups residentially, although these forces were generally overwhelmed by other redistributive and compositional changes. The evidence further suggests that the degree of isolation experienced by African-Americans were strongly impacted by the residential behavior of whites and Hispanics. African-Americans and Asians, however, did increasingly share the same neighborhoods over time.

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