Author Description

While considerable research has been conducted on racial and ethnic residential patterns in metropolitan areas, such patterns in "places" (also commonly referred to as towns and cities) have received much less attention. In this report, we examine residential housing patterns in places using five dimensions of residential segregation that have been developed in the professional literature (evenness, exposure, concentration, centralization, and clustering) for Blacks or African Americans, Hispanics or Latinos, Asians and Pacific Islanders (with separate estimates for Asians and Native Hawaiians and Other Pacific Islanders in an Appendix), and American Indians and Alaska Natives. Examining such patterns in places gives better insight into how residential patterns vary across the urban core, the suburbs, and places outside of metropolitan areas altogether. This report does not attempt to identify the causes of racial and ethnic residential patterns in places, nor do we argue that residential patterns is a more serious problem in one area than another. Overall, American Indians and Alaska Natives had the lowest index scores for places, followed by Asians and Pacific Islanders, Hispanics or Latinos, and then Blacks. Index scores for all groups were dramatically lower in suburban places in comparisonwith central cities and metropolitan areas as a whole.