Sacramento ranks as a ‘highly segregated’ city, study finds. Why it’s worse than 30 years ago
Sacramento often touts its status as one of the most diverse cities in America, but the reputation obscures an ugly reality — racial residential segregation remains high.
It’s not just Sacramento, either. About 81% of large metropolitan areas in the United States were more segregated in 2019 than they were in 1990, according to a new analysis released Monday from UC Berkeley’s Othering & Belonging Institute, despite the fact that the nation is becoming increasingly diverse.
Racial residential segregation, the physical separation and sorting people into particular neighborhoods or areas on the basis of race, “remains the ‘lynchpin’ — the deep root cause — that sustains systemic racial inequality,” the researchers wrote. It is a defining factor to understand how residents have access to (or don’t have access to) good schools, nutritious food, clean water, living-wage jobs, health care, transportation and more.
“This country is still in dire shape,” Stephen Menendian, assistant director at the Othering & Belonging Institute and the study’s lead researcher, told Time magazine. “The uprisings of the last few years are not going to die down as long as we have a deeply racially unjust and racially segregated society.”
Black and Latino residents make up more of the population than they did 30 years ago, but the Sacramento region has become slightly more segregated, the study found. The city of Sacramento itself is also highly segregated, the study found. It ranked 67 out of 113 cities with a population of more than 200,000.
Neighborhoods like Del Paso Heights, South Natomas, Meadowview, Oak Park, and the Fruitridge area are highly segregated, according to the researchers’ analysis. Many of these same neighborhoods have been identified by the state as being under resourced communities of color where residents have a lower quality of life. Meanwhile, the analysis identified neighborhoods such as Little Pocket and parts of South Land Park, Rosemont, parts of North Oak Park and midtown as racially integrated.
Residential segregation trends in Sacramento have shifted significantly over the last 30 years: The Pocket, once a highly segregated neighborhood in the 1990s, now has low-medium segregation. And swathes of Arden Arcade, Elmhurst and West Tahoe Park that were once racially integrated in 2010 have become more segregated.
But Sacramento is far from the most segregated metropolitan area in the country. The study found that the metro areas of New York, Chicago, Milwaukee and Detroit were some of the most segregated. Of the 221 metro regions with populations of 200,000 or more, the Sacramento-Arden Arcade-Roseville metro area ranked 82 on a list of most to least segregated communities.
The study identified only two metropolitan areas — San Luis Obispo-Paso Robles and Colorado Springs, Colorado — as being integrated.
Looking across the country, the researchers found that highly segregated communities of color consistently had a worse life outcomes — lower home values, higher poverty, higher unemployment, lower home ownership — than highly segregated white neighborhoods.
The study found that the median household income in highly segregated white neighborhoods is nearly twice that of highly segregated communities of color, or about $101,000 compared to about $54,300.
The analysis also found that children raised in integrated neighborhoods had better outcomes than children raised in segregated communities of color, but that the best economic outcomes occurred in highly segregated white neighborhoods, even for non-white children living in those areas.
For example, Black children raised in highly segregated white neighborhoods earned nearly $4,000 more as adults than Black children raised in highly segregated communities of color.
“These results reinforce our view that racial residential segregation is a structural force that allocates and distributes vitalizing resources,” the researchers wrote. “It is unlikely that we can ever close out racial disparities let alone significantly improve life outcomes for racially marginalized people in a racially segregated society.”
This story was originally published June 23, 2021 at 9:01 AM.