First results from the 2010 U.S. Census were released Tuesday, kicking off the decennial battle over political reapportionment. The news that Missouri and Illinois each will lose one seat in the U.S. House of Representatives means next year’s redistricting battles will be even tougher than usual.
Census counting is a high-stakes game. Who gains and who loses dictates many decisions, and not just which politician represents which district. A lot of federal spending and benefits are doled out by congressional district.
But aside from the raw politics, slicing and dicing census data is a constant process. Seemingly every week a new update or survey provides insight into some aspect of Americans and their lives.
A report issued last month that looked at Census Bureau housing data revealed some good news about reversing racial segregation in major metropolitan areas — including in St. Louis.
In analyzing the housing data, William Frey, a demographer from the Brookings Institution, posed this question: “Four decades since landmark civil rights legislation was enacted, the question can be raised: Have we seen a reduction in black residential segregation?”
The answer decidedly is yes, he said.
“The new data show that 61 of the 100 largest metro areas registered declines in black-white segregation when measured by the index of dissimilarity — which ranges from zero (complete integration) to 100 (complete segregation).”
Mr. Frey found that much of the growth in racial integration since 2000 has taken place in metro areas in the Sun Belt (Tampa, Atlanta, Orlando and Houston) — the result of a larger black middle class moving to places that provide greater economic opportunities. But three industrial Midwest cities — Detroit, Indianapolis and Kansas City — also showed significant gains in neighborhood integraton.
But while progress is real and sustained, Mr. Frey cautioned, it also has been slow and modest.
In the St. Louis region, the so-called “dissimilarity index” moved marginally in the right direction, as it has every 10 years since at least 1980.
But the St. Louis region remains in a dismal place regarding racial segregation. The dissimilarity index measures the percentage of the black population that would have to move to achieve residential parity by race in the region. The percentage in St. Louis is 72.95 percent.
That’s down slightly from 74 percent in 2000 and from 81.7 percent in 1980. But it still ranks seventh highest for residential polarization among the 100 most-populous metro areas.
Even metropolitan areas showing the most rapid improvements score above 50 percent on the dissimilarity index. These data long have been accompanied by persistent disparities by race in employment, income, homeownership, access to health care, savings rates, educational attainment and infant mortality — in St. Louis and across the nation.
St. Louis is one of the nation’s most segregated metropolitan areas. It is moving in the right direction, albeit at the glacially slow pace of about 1 percent in the “dissimilarity index” every 10 years. It goes without saying that we need to do better.
