The most segregated metro areas in America

The Milwaukee metro area scores 55.6 on the CensusEasy Segregation Score, the highest of any US metro area with at least 500,000 residents. The score is an index of dissimilarity, a standard measure in demographic research: it says that 55.6% of Milwaukee residents would have to move to a different census tract for every neighborhood to match the metro's overall racial mix. At the other end, Spokane, Washington scores 20.1. The median large metro is at 39.5.

The score runs from 0 to 100, where 0 means every neighborhood looks like the metro as a whole and 100 means complete separation. It compares white residents who are not Hispanic against everyone else, tract by tract, across the 2020-2024 American Community Survey. It measures how people are spread out, not how many of each group live there.

The 25 most segregated large metro areas

Fourteen of the top 25 are in the Midwest or the Northeast and nine are in the South. Only two, Los Angeles and Bakersfield, are in the West. The Midwestern entries are the old manufacturing cities that drew Black workers north during the Great Migration and then hemmed them in with restrictive covenants, redlined mortgage maps, and highways routed through their neighborhoods: Cleveland, Detroit, Buffalo, St. Louis, Chicago, and Milwaukee.

Segregation fell in 103 of 108 large metro areas

Every metro in the top 25 with a 2020 score is less segregated now than it was then. Across all 108 large metros that can be compared, 103 declined and 5 rose, and the average drop was 2.7 points. St. Louis fell the most, from 54.6 to 49.0. Cincinnati fell 4.7 points and Detroit 4.4.

The five that moved the other way cluster in one place. Stockton rose 1.8 points, Modesto 1.6, Fresno and Riverside-San Bernardino 0.4 each. Four of the five are in California's Central Valley or Inland Empire, the parts of the state absorbing households priced out of the coastal metros. Palm Bay, Florida rounds out the list at 0.9.

Four years is a short window, and a 2.7-point average shift is small next to the 35-point gap between Milwaukee and Spokane. The direction is consistent, though: the same measure, the same tract boundaries, four years apart, moving down almost everywhere.

A diverse metro is not the same as an integrated one

Across the 111 large metros, the correlation between the diversity score and the segregation score is 0.16, which is close to no relationship at all. Los Angeles scores 84.9 for diversity, among the highest in the country, and 50.9 for segregation, tenth highest. Houston is the most diverse large metro at 85.6, and sits 20th for segregation at 46.2. Chicago and New York follow the same pattern.

The reverse combination exists too. Tulsa scores 71.6 for diversity and 27.2 for segregation. Seattle is at 77.6 and 29.1, Albuquerque at 76.4 and 30.5. Those metros have populations nearly as mixed as Chicago's and spread far more evenly across their neighborhoods.

The two scores answer different questions. Diversity asks who lives in the metro. Segregation asks whether they live near each other. A study of the counties that diversified most since 2000 covers the first question in detail.

The 10 least segregated large metro areas

Seven of the ten are in the Mountain West or the Pacific Northwest, metros that added most of their population after the legal barriers of the mid-century era came down. Two of them, Portland, Maine and Springfield, Missouri, score under 31 for diversity, so there is less separation available to measure. Seattle and Tulsa have no such excuse.

At the county level, the Bronx leads

Metro boundaries average across suburbs and city cores. Counties cut finer, and the ranking changes: Bronx County, New York tops the list of counties with at least 250,000 residents at 62.3, above every metro in the country.

Without a population floor the highest scores belong to small metros around tribal land or the Texas border, where a reservation or colonia sits next to a town with a different population. Show Low, Arizona, next to the Fort Apache and Navajo reservations, scores 69.5 across 109,946 residents. Lexington, Nebraska, a meatpacking town of 26,255, scores 61.8. The full list of all 925 metros in the CSV includes them; the tables above use a floor so the comparison stays between places of similar size.