Cityscape

It's Official: Detroit Is The Nation's Least-Diverse Big City

December 21, 2014, 10:29 PM

Priceonomics, a San Francisco-based start-up that helps companies crawl and structure data from the web, has analyzed U.S. Census data and sorted out the 45 most populous American cities as to the diversity of their residents.

Its conclusion: Oakland, California, is the nation's most diverse city.

Detroit is the least diverse.

The study was published while a discussion has broken out in Detroit about the racial makeup of downtown and Midtown's popular gathering places, a conversation that Detroit News editorial boss Nolan Finley continued in the Detroit News last week.

"We looked at five groups -- white people, black people, Hispanics/Latinos, Asians, and a miscellaneous category including people of mixed race, Native Americans, and Pacific Islanders," writes Priceonomics staffer Rosie Cima.

To rank the cities' diversity, Priceonomics used an economic concept used to quantify competition in law, antitrust and technology management known as the Herfindahl–Hirschman Index, whose formula is at left.

Oakland's population is about 34 percent white, 28 percent black, 17 percent Asian and 25 percent Hispanic. (The figures do not total 100 percent because of racial duplication.)

Detroit is 80.7% black (non-Hispanic), 11 percent white, 1.1 percent Asian and 6.8 percent Hispanic.

Cima notes the two cities at the bottom of the diversity chart have national minorities in the majority: El Paso, Texas, is the most Hispanic/Latino major city in America, and also its second-least diverse.

Detroit is the major American city with the highest proportion of African Americans, and the smallest percentage of whites.

In a previous chart that tracked the ethnic and racial makeup of large cities, Priceonomics said Portland has already been outed as the whitest major city in America -- at 72.2% white, it’s almost a full ten percentage points above the national rate of 62.6%.

Nearly 10,000 people of color moved out of the city between 2000 and 2010. "The exodus from the central city causes me great concern; it is alarming," Portland Mayor Sam Adams told Cima.

The real story behind the diversity chart, Priceonomics wrote, is that white people are relatively well-represented in almost every major city, though not Detroit.

Following Oakland as the nation's most diverse cities are Sacramento, California; New York; Chicago; Long Beach, California; San Jose; Boston; San Diego; San Francisco and Houston. Milwaukee, interestingly, is the 11th most diverse city.

Behind Detroit and El Paso as the least-diverse cities are Portland; Miami; Colorado Springs; Louisville/Jefferson County, Ky.; Omaha; Mesa, Ariz.; Memphis and Baltimore.


Read more:  Priceonomics


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