The Most Segregated Metros in America

When people say a city is segregated, they usually mean something they can feel but not quite measure: certain neighborhoods are mostly White, others are mostly not, and the line between them holds year after year. The measure on this page puts a number to that feeling.

CensusEasy's segregation score is a White / non-White index of dissimilarity, scored from 0 to 100. It answers one question: what share of one group would have to move to a different neighborhood for the two groups to be spread evenly across the metro? A score of 0 would mean every census tract has the same racial mix as the metro overall. A score of 100 would mean total separation, with no tract shared. The scores below are computed from American Community Survey tract-level race data for 2020 to 2024. You can read the full method on the methodology page.

So a score of 55 doesn't mean 55 percent of people live in a segregated area. It means that to even things out, roughly 55 percent of one group would have to pick up and relocate to a different tract. That is a high bar, and the metros at the top of this list clear it.

The most segregated large metros

Among metros with more than 700,000 residents, Milwaukee, WI ranks first at 55.6. A metro of about 1.6 million people, it has long been near the top of national segregation measures, and the ACS data keeps it there.

Memphis, TN-MS-AR follows at 54.9, then Cleveland, OH at 54.4. New York, NY-NJ sits fourth at 53.7, which surprises people who think of segregation as a small-city or Southern phenomenon. New York is the largest metro in the country, with more than 20 million residents, and it is among the most divided by neighborhood.

Detroit, MI scores 52.2 and Birmingham, AL 51.5. Miami, FL and Buffalo, NY are tied at 51.3, two metros with very different histories arriving at nearly the same number. Los Angeles, CA, the second-largest metro on the list at almost 12.8 million people, comes in at 50.9.

The next group sits in the high 40s: New Orleans, LA at 49.2, St. Louis, MO-IL at 49.0, Chicago, IL-IN at 48.7, Philadelphia, PA-NJ-DE-MD at 48.5, and Atlanta, GA at 48.3. These are still high scores. The gap between Milwaukee at 55.6 and Atlanta at 48.3 is real but narrower than the raw rank order suggests.

Why the industrial Midwest and Northeast lead

Look at where these metros cluster. Milwaukee, Cleveland, Detroit, Buffalo, St. Louis, Chicago, Philadelphia, New York. With a few Southern exceptions, the top of this list is the old industrial belt that runs from the Great Lakes to the Atlantic. That is not a coincidence, and it is not mainly about present-day attitudes. It is about how these cities were built, financed, and zoned in the middle of the 20th century.

Three mechanisms did most of the work. The first was redlining. Beginning in the 1930s, federal mortgage agencies and the maps they relied on graded neighborhoods for lending risk, and they consistently marked Black and mixed neighborhoods as hazardous. That cut off the home loans that built White suburban wealth, and it concentrated Black residents in the parts of the city where credit was withheld. The industrial cities that drew large numbers of Black workers during the Great Migration are exactly the places where these maps were drawn most aggressively.

The second was the restrictive covenant: a clause written into a property deed barring the owner from ever selling to Black buyers, and in many places to Jewish, Asian, and other buyers as well. Courts stopped enforcing these in 1948, but by then they had already locked the residential pattern of cities like Detroit and Chicago into place. A covenant did not have to be enforceable to keep working. The neighborhood it created stayed put.

The third was public investment, and this is where the legacy turns physical. As the interstate highway program rolled through cities in the 1950s and 1960s, planners routinely routed expressways through Black neighborhoods, clearing housing and walling off what remained. Around the same time, large public-housing projects were sited in already-segregated areas rather than spread across the metro, which deepened the concentration instead of relieving it. Cleveland, Detroit, St. Louis, and Chicago all carry this history in their street grids today.

The Southern metros on the list, Memphis, Birmingham, New Orleans, and Atlanta, share the redlining and covenant history but reflect an older layer too, the residential patterns that hardened under Jim Crow and never fully unwound. Miami and Los Angeles add their own variations, including covenants aimed at multiple groups and immigration patterns that settled along the lines earlier policy had already drawn.

The point is structural, not moral. These are not the metros where people are most prejudiced. They are the metros where 20th-century policy drew the hardest lines, and where those lines have proven slow to move. A dissimilarity score measures the shape that history left behind. It does not assign blame for it.

Reading the numbers carefully

A high score tells you neighborhoods are sorted by race. It does not tell you why any one family lives where it does, and it says nothing about the quality of life inside any neighborhood. Two metros can share a score and feel nothing alike on the ground. The index is a starting point for asking better questions, not the end of the conversation.

If you want to see where every large metro falls, the full ranking of the most segregated metros lays them out in order, and you can put any two side by side with the compare tool. The pattern these cities share was built deliberately, over decades. Understanding it is the first step toward reading what the numbers are actually saying.

Sources

Segregation scores are computed by CensusEasy from tract-level race data in the U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey (2020 to 2024). For the full calculation, see the CensusEasy methodology, and for the complete list see the ranking of the most segregated metros.