Justice
America Has Half as Many Hypersegregated Metros as It Did in 1970
That’s the good news. The bad: U.S. cities aren’t necessarily more integrated.
A city is “hypersegregated” if it meets four of the following five criteria:
The concept of hypersegregation was developed in 1989 by Douglas Massey, currently a sociologist at Princeton and director of the university’s Office of Population Research. Its social effects are predictably terrible: poverty, crime, and bad schools among them. But as Massey reports in a new paper in the journal Demography, the number of U.S. metro areas suffering hypersegregation seems to be on the decline—down from 40 in 1970 to 21 in 2010.