Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
It's not like Philadelphia is integrated, Mt. Airy's reputation and the presence of two sizable black populations in its storied Main Line suburbs that both stretch back more than a century notwithstanding.
But the funny thing about residential segregation in Philadelphia is that there's a sort of patchwork-quilt quality to it. You don't have these vast swaths of territory that are all-white, all-black or all-Hispanic that you do in, say, Chicago or Kansas City. Segregation in Boston, IIRC, has this same quality to it.
It's not like Philadelphia is integrated, Mt. Airy's reputation and the presence of two sizable black populations in its storied Main Line suburbs that both stretch back more than a century notwithstanding.
But the funny thing about residential segregation in Philadelphia is that there's a sort of patchwork-quilt quality to it. You don't have these vast swaths of territory that are all-white, all-black or all-Hispanic that you do in, say, Chicago or Kansas City. Segregation in Boston, IIRC, has this same quality to it.
I'd mostly agree with you, but I'd say that the western half of North Philadelphia, southwest Philadelphia and West Philadelphia (aside from University City) are nearly all-black (many contiguous census tracts of 90+% black).
Boston has many racially integrated neighborhoods. Roslindale Allston Hyde Park Jamaica Plain Come to mind but to a lesser extent South End West Roxbury and East Boston.
The surrounding urban areas like Quincy Malden Everett Randolph Stoughton ae very integrated. Although the integrated towns are usually just experiencing white flight. Some towns have black sections like Milton does-west Roxbury and the south end have black sections on a neighborhood level.
It's the wealthier towns immediately west of the city and 15+ miles south and north that are 90%+ white. The problem is huge enormous chunks of the metro outside of 128 are lily white. Even the integrated neighborhoods and towns always have white sections which stands out because they are clearly the nicest sections of town-larger homes, wider cleaner streets, generally less urban . Even in cities that are heavily minority whites still live sort of segregated-like they strive to not have minority neighbors.
Philly really is segregated though, although you'll see more minorities closer to downtown because the real estate isn't as ostensibly unaffordable this black people are closer to downtown and now ingrained in the culture. Boston 's Public School are much more diverse than Philly 's and I think that's a slightly more accurate reflection of who actually grows up in the city.
Either way neither one is America's melting pot. Philly is more diverse ( barely) -than Boaton a city not known for being the 'nation's melting pot'.
Boston has many racially integrated neighborhoods. Roslindale Allston Hyde Park Jamaica Plain Come to mind but to a lesser extent South End West Roxbury and East Boston.
The surrounding urban areas like Quincy Malden Everett Randolph Stoughton ae very integrated. Although the integrated towns are usually just experiencing white flight. Some towns have black sections like Milton does-west Roxbury and the south end have black sections on a neighborhood level.
It's the wealthier towns immediately west of the city and 15+ miles south and north that are 90%+ white. The problem is huge enormous chunks of the metro outside of 128 are lily white. Even the integrated neighborhoods and towns always have white sections which stands out because they are clearly the nicest sections of town-larger homes, wider cleaner streets, generally less urban . Even in cities that are heavily minority whites still live sort of segregated-like they strive to not have minority neighbors.
Philly really is segregated though, although you'll see more minorities closer to downtown because the real estate isn't as ostensibly unaffordable this black people are closer to downtown and now ingrained in the culture. Boston 's Public School are much more diverse than Philly 's and I think that's a slightly more accurate reflection of who actually grows up in the city.
Either way neither one is America's melting pot. Philly is more diverse ( barely) -than Boaton a city not known for being the 'nation's melting pot'.
There have been some changes in settlement patterns, then, since I left in 1983. And this shouldn't surprise me at all. After all, down here, in my time here, the influx of better-off white Millennials has transformed Fishtown, Philly's answer to South Boston, into the same sort of yuppified community I understand Southie's become. They've also made something of a battleground out of Point Breeze, the mostly black part of South Philly.
I would never have listed the three southernmost Boston neighborhoods - West Roxbury, Roslindale, Hyde Park - in the "integrated" category; the South End was then as now clearly integrated along both racial/ethnic and socioeconmic lines. East Boston was working-class and poor Italian back when I lived there.
I've already mentioned the black communities on the Main Line; in Ardmore, Tredyffrin and Easttown, and Bryn Mawr. Upper Darby Township is our suburban ethnic stew, and there's a cluster of mostly black suburbs to Upper Darby's south: Yeadon (middle class), Darby Borough and Township, Colwyn (these three mostly poor), and Lansdowne/East Lansdowne (racially and socioeconomically integrated).
By East Coast standards, Philadelphia has the most affordable housing of the five big metropolises, or second-most-affordable after Baltimore.
The 1990s were the decade of greatest racial relocation in Boston and southern New England broadly. Several banks were brought to federal court in class action lawsuits that had been building since the mid-80s. They were being charged with illegal and or predatory lending practices which created artificial ghettos like North Hartford, Roxbury and South Providence (many others). A flurry of settlements and indictments in 1993-1995 opened up the doors in a MAJOR way for blacks and Latinos to settle in what had been working class white enclaves/towns and neighborhoods. Fleet Bank was one of the primary culprits.
Minorities had been being dispersed through the destruction of housing projects and expansion of the section 8 program, but when these court cases were settled and banks had to change their lending practices neighborhoods changed rapidly.
In Hyde Park white youth gangs and black youth gangs battles in the mid 90s with the black youths eventually prevailing. Hyde Park High School, virtually all white during the 1970s busing crisis, became virtually all black until it was reconfigured in 2006 and closed in 2014. Hyde Park felt a judge demographic shift in the 1990s because it borders all-black Matt Pana which was made all black by redlining and block busting from 1968-1972. Whites fought hard for decades to keep mattapan out but without the banks in their side they had no chance. Whites now live in the outskirts of the neighborhood nearest Dedham and Milton and even that is changing.
Hyde Park is the city's third blackest neighborhood at 48% but remains 24% white-about 30% Hispanic (mostly Dominican) . Hyde Park hasn't been majority white in about 25 years. In 1990 it was 57% white and in 2000 it was 43%.
Mattapan remains the blackest neighborhood at 77%
Roslindale is 45% white 22% Hispanic and 19% black. Roslindale cuaghtt POC fleeing from JP sgentrification as well as those looking to move out of Hyde Park and be closer to better schools. The lack of rapid train service to Roslindale Hyde Park and West Roxbury made them less desirable as time wore on when compared to JP Roxbury and mission Hill. The long buss commutes to downtown are not desirable for young professionals. Roslindale is gentrifying again and may be majority white in 2020.
West Roxbury is about 69% white 11% black and 15% hispanic. The area that border Hyde Park and Dedham has had some pretty terrible retail and is really poorly planned. Lots of apartment buildings and older town homes, it also is fairly isolated from the rest of WR so it has become the center of diversity due to its affordability. Some inroads have been made into West Roxbury's more commercial areas but there's more work to do. Much of West Roxbury touches Brookline and Jamaica Plain and the homes are so expensive and grand they will likely never see radical change.
Dorchester is is the largest neighborhood in the city with 125k people nowadays. It is 45% black and 21% White 10% asian. It has experienced gentrification but it's so big that the vast majority of it has become a West Indian stronghold with more entrenched Black American families on trolling the politics than Irish. It also plays a very very central role in both organized and street crime throughout New England. It is not uncoon to see people from Dorchester arrested in CT NYC RI NH Maine..and people from NYC and CT Brockton and RI being arrested in Dorchester. The CULTURE of crime is embedded in Dorchester broadly through multiple ethnicities, generations, legal and illegal occupations etc. and makes it hard to due a large scale gentrification.
Most old school Irish families cashed out of Dorchester during this decade and we're replaced with smaller white households of yuppies-so they're numbers have dropped from 49% of the population in 1990 to 36% in 2000 to 32% in 2010 down to 21/22% today.
Roxbury is 61% black and 10% white. It has become a battleground for gentrification due to its proximity to the South End and South Boston.
South End is majority white again for the first time since the 1960s. It is not integrated anymore . It is virtually 90% white/international asian outside of the many housing projects. The numerous large housing projects keep it black and Latino population at about 25/30%. The rest is all white and Asian, very few black or brown people live in market rate housing in the south end. Some of the professional class but still very small. It is a white neighborhood now than it has been in a long time and continues to trend that way as black Baptists churches have left and been converted to condos. And as the year down the high rise projects...
Jamaica Plain was majority minority in 1990 and 2000 but is now over 55% white.
Allston is 54% white with a large Asian and Hispanic population but very few blacks.
Chinatown is still mostly Chinese but with a growing white yuppie population.
East Boston is 57% Hispanic mostly Central American, that population is no longer growing as the tea is being gentrified rapidly. In 2000 East Boston was an even mix of Italian and Hispanic.
The city of Quincy is now 33% Asian and about 5% black- the schools have been majority minority for about 5 years.
Like I said it's undergone the most significant demographic change of any major east coast city. About 43% of all kids born in MA are.iboritues and in the Boston area it's more like 47%.
In Boston itself, 78% of all kids 18U are minorities (Which is down a bit since 2010 ish)No one ethnic roup is over 37/38% of the city's youth population (Black kids still out number Hispanic kids in Boston by 1 or 2% points).
Generally since the early/mid 2000s the minority population has been pushed out of the Boston urban core (out of fenway, the south end, mission hill, cambridge, Somerville, Medford) and to places more on the periphery of the city but still in the city or adjacent (West Roxbury, Chelsea, Everett, Hyde Park, Quincy). Anything near the green line or along theass pike or close to downtown is being yuppified as outer regions diversify.
The sad thing is most of those inner core places had only begun getting a viable and sizeable minority population in the early 1990s maybe late 80s. Prior to that there wasn't much of a minority presence in Somerville Fenway Medford or Cambridge (mission hill was always pretty diverse and still is) so it was a short lived period.
A very strong case would be made that growing up in Philly vs. growing up in Boston since the 1990s- a Boston kid works have more exposure to diversity.
Last edited by BostonBornMassMade; 02-19-2019 at 09:59 AM..
The 1990s were the decade of greatest racial relocation in Boston and southern New England broadly. Several banks were brought to federal court in class action lawsuits that had been building since the mid-80s. They were being charged with illegal and or predatory lending practices which created artificial ghettos like North Hartford, Roxbury and South Providence (many others). A flurry of settlements and indictments in 1993-1995 opened up the doors in a MAJOR way for blacks and Latinos to settle in what had been working class white enclaves/towns and neighborhoods. Fleet Bank was one of the primary culprits.
Minorities had been being dispersed through the destruction of housing projects and expansion of the section 8 program, but when these court cases were settled and banks had to change their lending practices neighborhoods changed rapidly.
In Hyde Park white youth gangs and black youth gangs battles in the mid 90s with the black youths eventually prevailing. Hyde Park High School, virtually all white during the 1970s busing crisis, became virtually all black until it was reconfigured in 2006 and closed in 2014. Hyde Park felt a judge demographic shift in the 1990s because it borders all-black Matt Pana which was made all black by redlining and block busting from 1968-1972. Whites fought hard for decades to keep mattapan out but without the banks in their side they had no chance. Whites now live in the outskirts of the neighborhood nearest Dedham and Milton and even that is changing.
Hyde Park is the city's third blackest neighborhood at 48% but remains 24% white-about 30% Hispanic (mostly Dominican) . Hyde Park hasn't been majority white in about 25 years. In 1990 it was 57% white and in 2000 it was 43%.
Mattapan remains the blackest neighborhood at 77%
Roslindale is 45% white 22% Hispanic and 19% black. Roslindale cuaghtt POC fleeing from JP sgentrification as well as those looking to move out of Hyde Park and be closer to better schools. The lack of rapid train service to Roslindale Hyde Park and West Roxbury made them less desirable as time wore on when compared to JP Roxbury and mission Hill. The long buss commutes to downtown are not desirable for young professionals. Roslindale is gentrifying again and may be majority white in 2020.
West Roxbury is about 69% white 11% black and 15% hispanic. The area that border Hyde Park and Dedham has had some pretty terrible retail and is really poorly planned. Lots of apartment buildings and older town homes, it also is fairly isolated from the rest of WR so it has become the center of diversity due to its affordability. Some inroads have been made into West Roxbury's more commercial areas but there's more work to do. Much of West Roxbury touches Brookline and Jamaica Plain and the homes are so expensive and grand they will likely never see radical change.
Dorchester is is the largest neighborhood in the city with 125k people nowadays. It is 45% black and 21% White 10% asian. It has experienced gentrification but it's so big that the vast majority of it has become a West Indian stronghold with more entrenched Black American families on trolling the politics than Irish. It also plays a very very central role in both organized and street crime throughout New England. It is not uncoon to see people from Dorchester arrested in CT NYC RI NH Maine..and people from NYC and CT Brockton and RI being arrested in Dorchester. The CULTURE of crime is embedded in Dorchester broadly through multiple ethnicities, generations, legal and illegal occupations etc. and makes it hard to due a large scale gentrification.
Most old school Irish families cashed out of Dorchester during this decade and we're replaced with smaller white households of yuppies-so they're numbers have dropped from 49% of the population in 1990 to 36% in 2000 to 32% in 2010 down to 21/22% today.
Roxbury is 61% black and 10% white. It has become a battleground for gentrification due to its proximity to the South End and South Boston.
South End is majority white again for the first time since the 1960s. It is not integrated anymore . It is virtually 90% white/international asian outside of the many housing projects. The numerous large housing projects keep it black and Latino population at about 25/30%. The rest is all white and Asian, very few black or brown people live in market rate housing in the south end. Some of the professional class but still very small. It is a white neighborhood now than it has been in a long time and continues to trend that way as black Baptists churches have left and been converted to condos. And as the year down the high rise projects...
Jamaica Plain was majority minority in 1990 and 2000 but is now over 55% white.
Allston is 54% white with a large Asian and Hispanic population but very few blacks.
Chinatown is still mostly Chinese but with a growing white yuppie population.
East Boston is 57% Hispanic mostly Central American, that population is no longer growing as the tea is being gentrified rapidly. In 2000 East Boston was an even mix of Italian and Hispanic.
The city of Quincy is now 33% Asian and about 5% black- the schools have been majority minority for about 5 years.
Like I said it's undergone the most significant demographic change of any major east coast city. About 43% of all kids born in MA are.iboritues and in the Boston area it's more like 47%.
In Boston itself, 78% of all kids 18U are minorities (Which is down a bit since 2010 ish)No one ethnic roup is over 37/38% of the city's youth population (Black kids still out number Hispanic kids in Boston by 1 or 2% points).
Generally since the early/mid 2000s the minority population has been pushed out of the Boston urban core (out of fenway, the south end, mission hill, cambridge, Somerville, Medford) and to places more on the periphery of the city but still in the city or adjacent (West Roxbury, Chelsea, Everett, Hyde Park, Quincy). Anything near the green line or along theass pike or close to downtown is being yuppified as outer regions diversify.
The sad thing is most of those inner core places had only begun getting a viable and sizeable minority population in the early 1990s maybe late 80s. Prior to that there wasn't much of a minority presence in Somerville Fenway Medford or Cambridge (mission hill was always pretty diverse and still is) so it was a short lived period.
A very strong case would be made that growing up in Philly vs. growing up in Boston since the 1990s- a Boston kid works have more exposure to diversity.
Had to +1 this one! That's a really detailed account and analysis of Boston's diversity. I feel like the city is so underrated for it's diversity.
As for the answer, I'd have to say NYC is most deserving of the "melting pot" status.
20 years ago I would've said New York and not even close. But nowadays, lets be real - most large American cities have some sort of diversity. The true divide isn't between cities because that really is just splitting hairs, the true divide is between city vs. suburban vs. rural areas.
The 1990s were the decade of greatest racial relocation in Boston and southern New England broadly. Several banks were brought to federal court in class action lawsuits that had been building since the mid-80s. They were being charged with illegal and or predatory lending practices which created artificial ghettos like North Hartford, Roxbury and South Providence (many others). A flurry of settlements and indictments in 1993-1995 opened up the doors in a MAJOR way for blacks and Latinos to settle in what had been working class white enclaves/towns and neighborhoods. Fleet Bank was one of the primary culprits.
[major snippage]
A very strong case would be made that growing up in Philly vs. growing up in Boston since the 1990s- a Boston kid works have more exposure to diversity.
Thanks for the detailed explanation of Boston's racial transformation since the 1980s. FTR, Allston was the only neighborhood within the city limits that I lived in during the seven years I spent in the area. I lived in Watertown for one year, on campus in Cambridge for the first three, and at three different addresses in the same part of Allston (close to the defunct A branch of the Green Line - I wrote about an effort to revive it in the equally defunct Allston-Brighton (Citizen-)Item in 1982) for the last three. It was gaining its Hispanic population at the time.
I would add to that last sentence "unless that Philly kid lived in the lower Northeast." That part of the city has become a little United Nations in the decades since 1990, thanks to its becoming the settlement neighborhood of choice for immigrants from the Caribbean (English- and Spanish-speaking), Brazil, Korea and a smattering of other countries. Ironically, this part of the city was where the white ethnics who feared the city's expanding black population in the years of the Great Migration and those following it yet didn't want to leave the city, or couldn't because they worked for it (the city did not drop the residency requirement for its workforce until the early 2000s), moved to from the 1920s through the 1970s - it's the last part of Philadelphia to be built out.
I lived in the lower Northeast for 18 months, off Oxford Circle. Two memories in particular stick out. One was participating in a block cleanup one spring morning where my helpmate was an older Haitian woman. We could only communicate in smiles and gestures because she knew no English and I knew no French Creole.
The other was waiting on the platform one morning for a Market-Frankford Line train into Center City and talking with my Caribbean-American next-door neighbor. She was lamenting how the African-Americans moving into the neighborhood were bringing it down. Guess she thought I was an immigrant too.
Sacramento/Oakland or Houston. I understand DC and NYC, the rest? hell no.
Philly is really only as diverse as Boston.
Miami??
LA doesn't have enough black people
KC is a joke
Quote:
Originally Posted by iAMtheVVALRUS
Isn’t Sacramento really good in this regard? I’m surprised it’s not a poll option.
Quote:
Originally Posted by citylove101
FWIW I also think that Cali cities like Oakland and Long Beach should be contenders. Never visited Sacramento.
I've yet to be anywhere as integrated and diverse as Sacramento. There are other cities on that same level with it, but Sacramento's diversity scale is huge, as is its integration level...
Just as a quick illustration, South Sacramento is the largest region of the city, and is about the size of Pittsburgh proper in both area (55.4 sq miles) and population (~299,000). That is a fairly large area we're covering, right?
South Sac is overwhelmingly majority-minority (about 27% white, lesser than the ~32% for the city as a whole), with only four neighborhoods having a 50% majority--->incidentally, three of those four neighborhoods are 50%+ white, the other Asian. Additionally, those four neighborhoods combined only account for about 16% of South Area's land area (~9 sq miles), and about 11% of South Area's population (~33,000 people). South Sacramento is heavily integrated, obviously some neighborhoods more than others, but very heavily integrated with an enormous amount of diversity...
So I think everyone pretty much agrees Sacramento is on the short list of most diverse cities, but I don't think people have a great handle on the scale because isn't a popular city. Again, there's a part of Sacramento that is essentially the same size as Pittsburgh proper, with overwhelming diversity and integration. It can be jarring to note, particularly when you come from somewhere not especially diverse...
What I've learned is that, that integration comes with some societal issues if it's own--->for example, there is no longer a majority black neighborhood in Sacramento and there were only about four historically. Blacks are marginalized in Sac probably to a lesser degree than most cities, but like most cities, we are marginalized more than any other group as well, and the lack of a "black area" or a "black neighborhood" I think contributes to continued marginalization that leads to profiling and other discriminatory tactics on a societal level, and makes the issues concerning blacks that much easier to "overlook" because there is no one, strong majority (50%+) community...
60% of black Sacramentans live in South Sacramento, but there is no neighborhood over 30% black; my South Sac family is clustered between Valley Hi (~20 black), Parkway (~19% black), Meadowview (~22% black), and Pocket-Greenhaven (~14% black). Meadowview being a neighborhood that was over 50% black from the mid-50s to mid-90s. Just something to think about, it's the gift and the curse...
Lastly, LA definitely deserves mention! As does Oakland and Long Beach...
Last edited by murksiderock; 03-07-2019 at 04:09 AM..
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
