The latest Census figures show a dramatic shift in the Black U.S. population, from the cities to the suburbs.
From USA Today:
2010 Census data released so far this year show that 20 of the 25 cities that have at least 250,000 people and a 20% black population either lost more blacks or gained fewer in the past decade than during the 1990s. The declines happened in some traditional black strongholds: Chicago, Oakland, Atlanta, Cleveland and St. Louis.
The loss is fueled by three distinct trends:
• Blacks — many in the middle or upper-middle class — leaving cities for the suburbs.
• Blacks leaving Northern cities for thriving centers in the South.
The black population is declining in many major cities:
Source: Analysis of 2010 Census data by William Frey, Brookings Institution
• The aging of the African-American population, whose growth rate has dropped from more than 16% in the 1990s to about 10% since 2000.
“In the Northern cities, a lot of young blacks who might have grown up in cities are leaving maybe the entire region,” says William Frey, demographer at the Brookings Institution who analyzed the data. “They’re going to the Sun Belt and particularly the South. The ones who stay in the area want to move to the suburbs.”
Atlanta’s loss of blacks tripled since 2000 to almost 30,000. The percentage of blacks in the city shrank to 53% from 61%. But in Atlanta’s vast metropolitan area, the black population soared 40% to 1.7 million, a clear indication that many spread out to suburban counties. The Atlanta region has the second-largest black population after New York.
The trend is particularly acute in the southern states:
Washington —
African Americans in the South are shunning city life for the suburbs at the highest levels in decades, rapidly integrating large metropolitan areas that were historically divided between inner-city blacks and suburban whites.
Census figures also show that Latino population growth for the first time outpaced that of blacks and whites in most of the South, adding to the region’s racial and ethnic mix.
“All of this will shake up the politics,” said Lance deHaven-Smith, a political science professor at Florida State University in Tallahassee. Because the South is a crucial region for Republicans in presidential elections, “all the Democrats have to do is pick up a couple Southern states and Republicans are in trouble.”
The share of blacks in large metropolitan areas who opted to live in the suburbs climbed to 58% in the South, compared with 41% for the rest of the U.S., according to census estimates. That’s up from 52% in 2000 and represents the highest share of suburban blacks in the South since the Civil Rights Act passed in the 1960s.
The South also had major gains in neighborhood integration between blacks and whites. Thirty-two of the region’s 38 largest metro areas made such gains since 2000, according to a commonly used demographic index. The measure, known as the segregation index, tracks the degree to which racial groups are evenly spread among neighborhoods. Topping the list were rapidly diversifying metro areas in central Florida, as well in Georgia, Texas and Tennessee. …
(Los Angeles Times) –
