Stable Integrated Neighborhoods: A Report to the Stephen H. Wilder Foundation

Casey-Leininger, Charles; Green, Erinn L.

There is good news for those who desire to live in stable racially integrated neighborhoods in Hamilton County. Starting with the 1970 Census, racial segregation declined modestly in the City of Cincinnati and to a smaller extent in suburban areas of the county. This occurred as, over the three decades from 1970 to 2000, an increasing number of communities found blacks and whites living together on the same blocks. Indeed, at the 2000 Census, about one-quarter of Hamilton County communities were racially integrated by the measures used in this study. Moreover, starting with the 1980 Census, fourteen of those communities have maintained stable racial integration. This is in sharp contrast to the results of a 1984 study that found few racially integrated neighborhoods between 1940 and 1980, and that those that did exist generally did so only as neighborhoods changed from largely white to largely black. This news is also in sharp contrast to newspaper accounts of the 2000 Census that reported that “Cincinnati” remained one of the most racially segregated cities in the country. However, many of these reports confused the City of Cincinnati with the much larger Cincinnati Primary Statistical Metropolitan Area, which ranked the 8th or 9th most segregated metropolitan area in the country depending on the study. In actuality, the City of Cincinnati ranked 67th most segregated among 245 cities with populations over 100,000.

Creator

License

Geographic Subject

Time Period