The US cities with the highest white share

The whitest city in America with more than 50,000 people is The Villages, Florida, the sprawling retirement community north of Orlando, where 94.9 percent of residents are non-Hispanic White. After that the list runs almost entirely through the Upper Midwest and a scatter of college towns, and it looks nothing like the list of cities where the most White people actually live.

These are non-Hispanic White shares, ranked among cities of at least 50,000 residents so the list stays to real cities rather than tiny homogeneous towns. Here are the top twelve.

The Upper Midwest and a retirement bubble

The Villages is its own phenomenon as it's a master-planned retirement city that grew from almost nothing into one of the fastest-growing metros in the country, and it drew a population that is overwhelmingly older and White, well above anything else on the list. Nothing else with 50,000 people comes within five points of it.

Below that, the geography is consistent. Duluth, La Crosse, Eau Claire, Ankeny, and Dubuque cluster in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa, the heart of a region that took in waves of German and Scandinavian settlers in the 1800s and never saw the later immigration and Great Migration that reshaped bigger cities. College towns show up for a related reason: places like Eau Claire and La Crosse are built around universities in otherwise rural, historically White areas.

The Dearborn asterisk

Number five on the list, Dearborn, Michigan, is the one that isn't what it looks like. Dearborn is one of the most heavily Arab American cities in the country, home to the largest mosque in the United States. It shows up as 87 percent White because the Census Bureau counts people of Middle Eastern and North African descent as White. There has never been a separate category for them on the form.

So Dearborn's "White" majority is largely Arab American, a community with its own language, history, and identity that the race question simply folds into White. It's the clearest example of why the White share can mislead: the category is broad enough to include groups that few people, including many of their own members, would describe that way. A new Middle Eastern or North African category was approved for future federal surveys in 2024, and once it appears, Dearborn's numbers will look very different.

That caveat aside, the list is a mirror image of the cities with the largest White populations, which are the big, diverse metros where White residents are often a minority. Count rewards size, share rewards concentration, and the two lists share not a single city. For the widest possible contrast, see the most diverse cities in America, and the full ranking of every city is at highest White share cities.

Sources

Figures are non-Hispanic White as a share of total population, from the U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey 5-year estimates, table B03002, among cities of at least 50,000 residents. The Census Bureau classifies people of Middle Eastern and North African descent as White; a separate category was adopted for future federal data collection in 2024.