Source: Salon.com (3-29-11)
...No. 9: Philadelphia
Main city population: 1,526,006
Metropolitan population: 5,965,343
Segregation level (dissimilarity): 68.41
According to University of Pennsylvania historian Thomas Sugrue, just 347 of the 120,000 homes constructed in the Philadelphia area between 1946 and 1953 were open to blacks. In the postwar years, working-class whites violently policed the boundaries of their neighborhoods, while the middle and upper classes fled to the suburbs well into the 1990s. Today, Puerto Rican neighborhoods divide working-class white and black neighborhoods in North Philadelphia and Kensington.
"The patterns of housing segregation in metropolitan Philadelphia are the legacy of discriminatory public policies and real-estate practices that played out for most of the 20th century," says Sugrue, who chronicled the area's open housing movement in "Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North." "Though discrimination is now illegal, those patterns of segregation were so deeply entrenched that many people came to see them as 'natural.'"...
No. 8: Cincinnati
Main city population: 296,943
Metropolitan population: 2,130,151
Segregation level (dissimilarity): 69.42
Before the Great Migration and the rise of exclusively white mass homeownership, Cincinnati blacks lived alongside white ethnics. The first black ghetto emerged in the city's West End during the 1930s as whites began to move out, spreading as white flight picked up. Over-the-Rhine, a historic 19th-century neighborhood built by German immigrants, later became one of the city's iconic black ghettos.
"In the '30s and '40s, as migration starts, [white] people start to move out of the basin," says Henry Louis Taylor Jr., a history professor at the University at Buffalo and the author of "Race and the City: Work, Community, and Protest in Cincinnati, 1820-1970." "As they move out of the basin into these hilltop neighborhoods, you get the first legitimate wave of segregating communities ... In the 1950s, '60 and '70s, as they leave Cincinnati, the patterns of racial residential segregation intensify."...
No. 1: Milwaukee
Main city population: 594,833
Metropolitan population: 1,555,908
Segregation level (dissimilarity): 81.52
Milwaukee is consistently rated one of the country's most segregated metro areas. Like Detroit and most places on this list, Milwaukee has been battered by deindustrialization, with segregated urban blacks disproportionately hurt as jobs and the tax base suburbanized and moved away.
"Most of our history is very similar to Chicago, Cleveland or even Baltimore," says Marc Levine, professor of history and economic development at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. "Every place has had the zoning ordinances, then restrictive covenants, the practices of realtors. The standard history. What makes Milwaukee a little bit different than these other places, which explains why we're consistently in the top five and often No. 1, in segregation? We have the lowest rate of African-American suburbanization of any of these larger cities."...
