http://ctx.sagepub.com/Contexts http://ctx.sagepub.com/content/4/1/33The online version of this article can be found at: DOI: 10.1525/ctx.2005.4.1.33 2005 4: 33ContextsJohn E. Farley and Gregory D. SquiresFences and Neighbors: Segregation in 21st-Century America Published by: http://www.sagepublications.comOn behalf of: American Sociological Association can be found at:ContextsAdditional services and information for http://ctx.sagepub.com/cgi/alertsEmail Alerts: http://ctx.sagepub.com/subscriptionsSubscriptions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navReprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navPermissions: http://ctx.sagepub.com/content/4/1/33.refs.htmlCitations: What is This? - Feb 1, 2005Version of Record >> at Texas A&M University - Medical Sciences Library on March 6, 2014ctx.sagepub.comDownloaded from at Texas A&M University - Medical Sciences Library on March 6, 2014ctx.sagepub.comDownloaded fromwinter 2005 contexts 33Contexts, Vol. 4, Issue 1, pp. 33-39, ISSN 1536-5042, electronic ISSN 1537-6052. © 2005 by the American Sociological Association. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Rights and Permissions website, at www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm.fences and neighbors: segregation in 21st-century america feature article john e. farley and gregory d. squiresAfter more than three decades of fair housing laws, residential segregation is declining, but it remains pervasive. It undermines minority families’ search for good jobs, quality schools, health care, and financial success. However, new organizing efforts, tools, and tactics offer hope for greater progress.“Do the kids in the neighborhood play hockey or basketball?”—anonymous home insurance agent, 2000America became less racially segregated during the lastthree decades of the 20th century, according to the 2000 cen-sus. Yet, despite this progress, despite the Fair Housing Act,signed 35 years ago, and despite popular impressions to thecontrary, racial minorities still routinely encounter discrimina-tion in their efforts to rent, buy, finance, or insure a home. TheU.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)estimates that more than 2 million incidents of unlawful dis-crimination occur each year. Research indicates that blacks andHispanics encounter discrimination in one out of every fivecontacts with a real estate or rental agent. African Americans,in particular, continue to live in segregated neighborhoods inexceptionally high numbers.What is new is that fair-housing and community-development groups are successfully using antidiscriminationlaws to mount a movement for fair and equal access to hous-ing. Discrimination is less common than just ten years ago;minorities are moving into the suburbs, and overall levels ofsegregation have gone down. Yet resistance to fair housingand racial integration persists and occurs today in forms thatare more subtle and harder to detect. Still, emerging coalitionsusing new tools are shattering many traditional barriers toequal opportunity in urban housing markets.Los Angeles, 1951Photo courtesy of the L.A. Public Library at Texas A&M University - Medical Sciences Library on March 6, 2014ctx.sagepub.comDownloaded fromcontexts winter 200534segregation: declining but not disappearingAlthough segregation has declined in recent years, it per-sists at high levels, and for some minority groups it has actual-ly increased. Social scientists use a variety of measures toindicate how segregated two groups are from each other. Themost widely used measure is the index of dissimilarity (labeledD in figure 1 on page 35) which varies from 0 for a perfectlyintegrated city to 100 for total segregation. (See sidebar for adefinition of segregation and more detail about the index ofdissimilarity.) Values of D in the 60s or higher generally repre-sent high levels of segregation.Although African Americans have long been and continueto be the most segregated group, they are notably more likelyto live in integrated neighborhoods than they were a genera-tion ago. For the past three decades, the average level of seg-regation between African Americans and whites has beenfalling, declining by about ten points on the D scale between1970 and 1980 and another ten between 1980 and 2000. Butthese figures overstate the extent to which blacks have beenintegrated into white or racially mixed neighborhoods. Part ofthe statistical trend simply has to do with how the censuscounts “metropolitan areas.” Between 1970 and 2000, manysmall—and typically integrated—areas “graduated” into themetropolitan category, which helped to bring down the nation-al statistics on segregation. More significantly, segregation hasdeclined most rapidly in the southern and western parts of theUnited States, but cities in these areas, especially the West, alsotend to have fewer African Americans. At the same time, inlarge northern areas with many African-American residents,integration has progressed slowly. For example, metropolitanareas like New York, Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, Newark,and Gary all had segregation scores in the 80s as late as 2000.Where African Americans are concentrated most heavily, seg-regation scores have declined the least. As figure 1 shows, in places with the highest proportions of black population, segregation decreased least between 1980 and 2000.Desegregation has been slowest precisely in the places AfricanAmericans are most likely to live. There, racial isolation can beextreme. For example, in the Chicago, Detroit, and Clevelandmetropolitan areas, most African Americans live in censustracts (roughly, neighborhoods) where more than 90 percentof the residents are black and fewer than 6 percent are white.Other minority groups, notably Hispanics and AsianAmericans, generally live in less segregated neighborhoods.Segregation scores for Hispanics have generally been in the low50s over the past three decades, and for Asian Americans andPacific Islanders, scores have been in the low 40s. NativeAmericans who live in urban areas also are not very segregat-ed from whites (scores in the 30s), but two-thirds of the NativeAmericans who live in rural areas (about 40 percent of theirtotal population) live on segregated reservations. Although noother minority group faces the extreme segregation in housingthat African Americans do,