Metropolitan Context and Racial/Ethnic Intermixing in Residential Space: U.S. Metropolitan Statistical Areas, 1990-20001

Abstract

Abstract This study is concerned with racial/ethnic intermixing as it varies among the 49 largest U.S. MSAs in 2000 and its change over the 1990-2000 decade. Race/ethnicity is defined in terms of the major census categories of African American, American Indian, Asian, Caucasian, and Hispanic. Intermixing is calibrated by the Theil Entropy Index, which treats the five groups simultaneously and produces measures of an MSA's diversity (Diversity Score) and its level of intermixing (Entropy). The latter (Entropy) also serves as a dependent variable in regression analyses, wherein independent variables include demographic, socio-economic, and built-environment characteristics. The study departs from earlier work at the urban system level in a number of ways. First, MSAs are treated as objects of study in their own right, not simply as observational units. Second, this leads to challenging the usual practice of employing a 1/0 dummy variable to indicate the region in which an MSA is located, a practice that interferes with the emergence of other, more place-specific factors. Third, earlier studies mainly examine metropolitan areas from the perspective of two-group comparisons, rather than the multi-group comparison approach taken here. Fourth, in a major conceptual departure from earlier work, we contextualize racial/ethnic mixing and its 1990-2000 change within broader forces of economic restructuring related to the Fordist/Post-Fordist transition and broad transformational processes that invoke such concepts as inertia, sunk cost, and path dependence effects. Especially noteworthy in our findings is that MSAs that lagged in racial/ethnic intermixing in 1990 experienced the greatest change in the 1990-2000 decade, a catch-up phenomenon that we attribute to a set of widely shared norms concerning intermixing—termed the community, or social, norm premise. Keywords: raceethnicityintermixingsegregationentropymetropolitan areasFordism/Post-Fordismeconomic transition