University of California Transportation Center

This paper compares the level of spatial segregation by race or ethnicity with the level of spatial segregation by demographic group in two metropolitan areas with similar incomes and demographic compositions, but with very different racial proportions. We compare census tract data for the San Francisco Bay Area for 1980, a region with six large ethnic divisions, with similar data for the Stockholm metropolitan area, a region with a much more homogeneous racial composition.

An extensive comparison of entropy measures of segregation in the two regions is presented, including for Stockholm, an analysis of spatial segregation by income class. One important finding of the analysis, replicated in two very different metropolitan regions, is that spatial segregation by race or ethnicity is unrelated to the principal economic factors which presumable underly spatial segregation by income clss or demographic grouping.