Black Suburbanization

This note presents empirical evidence on changes in an index measuring the relative decentralization of blacks for 40 MSAs during the 1970s. The evidence demonstrates that although other, more conventional indicators of suburbanization (which denote residence inside and outside the central city) demonstrate substantial changes, this is not the case for the decentralization indicator (which is independent of political jurisdictional boundaries). The implications are that blacks will gain little from near-central-city suburbanization if job growth, high-quality education, superior environments, and the like tend to follow higher-status whites into the evermore-distant exurbs.