Segregation by Racial and Demographic Group: Evidence from the San Francisco Bay Area

This paper considers residential segregation by race and by type of household in 1970 and 1980. The paper presents entropy indices of segregation for the San Francisco Bay Area and its five metropolitan areas . The methodology permits an investigation of the effects of group definition upon segregation measures, and an analysis of the degree of independence in the segregation of households by race and demographic group . The results indicate that the levels of segregation by race and by household type have declined modestly during the 1970s, at least in this region . More importantly, however, the results indicate a remarkable independence in the spatial distribution of households by race and demographic group . Only a very small fraction of the observed levels of segregation by race could be `explained' by the prior partitioning of households by demographic group . The principal results of the analysis are invariant to changes in the definition of racial or household groups.