Schelling’s neighborhood model tells us that the integration of groups in unstable given that two types of people do not want to be in a minority the size of which is somewhere around less than one third of the population. This was said to be the force at work in urban neighborhoods which were becoming increasingly segregated during his studies in the 60’s. Forty years after the Civil Rights Act and in a world much more tolerant and compassionate, is the racial segregation in neighborhoods still prevalent? Is “white flight” and “black flight,” the two terms referring to minorities leaving after the tipping point has been reached still occurring in integrated neighborhoods?

Such was the topic of a paper by Rawlings, Harris, Turner and Padilla published by the Urban Institute entitled Race and Residence: Prospects for Stable Neighborhood Integration. They examined 25,134 neighborhoods from 69 metropolitan areas and looked at the demographics from 1990 and 2000. What they found was that there were many integrated neighborhoods that were essentially unchanged demographically and more strikingly that Blacks were moving into predominantly white and virtually exclusively white neighborhoods, suggesting that perhaps the critical mass needed to sustain the neighborhood model is very small or even a non-issue. This suggests that the threshold for Blacks living in a neighborhood is quite small. Interestingly enough, however, they found that fewer neighborhoods that were predominantly Black became whiter than the other way around, suggesting the threshold size for Whites as the minority in a neighborhood may be larger. At any rate, it seems as though signs are positive and that across the board and that racial segregation in neighborhoods is becoming less of an issue. Hopefully there will come a day when Schelling’s model no longer applies to Blacks and Whites.