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A new report from Boston Indicators has found that Greater Boston neighborhoods increasingly divide into a world of haves and have-nots, even as it’s somewhat less segregated by race.
Researchers at the think-tank affiliated with The Boston Foundation used Census data to study both racial and income segregation in the region going back to 1980.
They found that, at the regional level, white and Black residents are increasingly living side-by-side – although white-Black segregation was still the highest among the three major racial-ethnic groups studied, slightly higher than white-Latino segregation and substantially higher than white-Asian segregation. The decline now puts Boston in the middle of the pack among America’s 50 biggest metro areas, when ranked by white-Black segregation.
“This growth in diversity matters. It means that today’s Greater Boston offers many residents the chance to live, work, and go to school alongside people from different backgrounds,” the report states.
White-Asian segregation declined modestly from 1980 to 2020, with Asian Bostonians generally tending to live in neighborhoods more similar to white residents.
While white-Latino segregation has come down from a five-decade high in 2000, but only to essentially the same level as in 1980. But the regional-level data obscures a trend, researchers said, of the region’s Latino communities are still concentrated in majority-Latino cities like Chelsea and Lawrence. It’s also made white-Latino segregation in Greater Boston among the highest nationally.
“Some residents, especially in immigrant communities, choose to live near others who share their language and culture. These clusters can provide valuable support systems and help newcomers navigate life in a new place,” the report said.
But researchers also called out the role exclusionary zoning has played in keeping rental housing out of many majority white suburbs in Greater Boston, cutting off poorer residents from the region’s best public school systems and less-polluted communities.
At the same time as racial integration has improved, though, economic segregation has gotten markedly worse, the Boston Indicators report said.
The top 20 percent of the region’s households have experienced large and outsized gains since 1980, relative to the bottom 80 percent of Greater Boston. Today, the average income for the top 20 percent of households in the region is $400,000, and the top 5 percent earns $700,000 per year on average, compared to the $21,000 average income for the bottom 20 percent and the $113,000 for the middle 20 percent of households.
In addition, the share of middle-income households in Greater Boston has shrunk to just 41 percent, the report found, down from 53 percent in 1980. Meanwhile, the share of high-income households has grown from 14 percent to 25 percent at the same time, while low-income households has stayed relatively constant, ending 2023 at 35 percent.
That gave metro Boston the fourth-smallest share of middle-income earners among the nation’s 50 biggest metro areas.
When translated into where Greater Boston residents are choosing to live, the Boston Indicators researchers found higher-income household segregation more than doubled from 1980 to 2023, with 15 percent living in only high-income neighborhoods.
“While this measure has fluctuated more than low-income segregation from year to year, the long-term trend is clear: Wealthier households are increasingly concentrated together, driving much of the overall increase in income segregation across the region,” the report said.
But despite this jump, Boston is still only 27th among America’s 50 largest metros for income segregation. That puts it on par with Austin, Texas, Charlotte, North Carolina and California’s Silicon Valley. The most economically segregated metro areas in America are, in order, Memphis, Tennessee, Houston, Texas and New York City.
