Study: Black population shifts to suburbs, wage gap widens
From The New York Times - Atlanta claims the second-largest black population, behind New York, while city children pass the "majority minority" threshold in a new census data study...
From Sam Roberts, The New York Times:
As the first decade of the 21st century comes to a close, more black, Asian, Hispanic, foreign-born and poor people live in the suburbs of the nation’s largest metropolitan areas than in their primary cities.
“Several trends in the 2000s further put to rest the old perceptions of cities as declining, poor, minority places set amid young, white, wealthy suburbs,” a report released Sunday by the Brookings Institution concluded.
That demographic inversion was accompanied by another first since the 2000 census: In the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan areas, black, Hispanic and Asian residents constitute a majority of residents younger than 18 – presaging a benchmark that the nation as a whole is projected to reach in just over a decade.
The ‘State of Metropolitan America’ report is drawn from census and other data through 2008. Except for income figures that will reflect the depths of the recession, few trends identified so far during the decade appear likely to be reversed by more recent census results.
With the first decade of the century nearly over, the number of married couples fell to fewer than half of the nation’s households, and the wage gap between rich and poor was the highest recorded in modern times (the 2010 census will apparently be the first in which the inflation-adjusted median household income will have declined over the decade). Meanwhile, the aging population was producing both a cultural generation gap between elderly whites and younger nonwhite residents and a surfeit of single people in the suburbs.
States of the “Old South” accounted for 57 percent of the nation’s black population in 2008, compared with 54 percent in 1990. Fully one-fifth of the metropolitan gains in black population since 2000 occurred in Atlanta, pushing it past Chicago for the second-largest black population, behind New York.
Racial and ethnic minorities now account for a majority of the population in 17 metropolitan areas, most of them in California and Texas, although New York, at 50.7 percent in 2008, is poised to pass that threshold in the 2010 census.
Asians made up 5 percent or more of the population in 22 of the largest metropolitan areas by 2008, compared with 9 in 1990. Since 2000, 26 metropolitan areas became at least 5 percent Hispanic, and an additional 10 areas passed 10 percent.
The Brookings report echoed other evidence of disparities among ethnic and racial groups. Last month, the American Human Development Project, a nonpartisan research group, found, for example, that Asians in New Jersey live an average of 26 years longer and are 11 times as likely to have a graduate degree than American Indians in South Dakota.
“The seeds of new racial and ethnic competition for public resources have been planted as a result of decade-long race-ethnic shifts,” said William H. Frey, a Brookings demographer.
In Arizona, which adopted a tough law last month giving the police broad discretion to question people about their immigration status, whites account for 83 percent of the population older than 65, but only 43 percent of those 18 and younger. That gap is greatest in Arizona, Dr. Frey said, but California, Florida, Nevada, New Mexico and Texas are not far behind.
“When inequities, disparities and suspicion grow, political problems accelerate,” Dr. Rodin said. “Today it’s about immigration. Tomorrow it could be about wages or jobs.”
Continue to the full article at The New York Times website.
