[NYguy]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/28/ny...er=rss&emc=rss

Non-Hispanic Whites Are Now a Minority in the 23-County New York Region

By SAM ROBERTS
March 27, 2011

For the first time, black, Hispanic and Asian residents of New York City and its suburbs are a majority of the metropolitan area’s more than 19 million residents, according to the 2010 census, released last week.

New York is the first major metropolitan area in the country outside the South or West in which non-Hispanic whites have become a minority of the population.

Some of the same dynamic that transformed New York into a majority-minority city in the 1980s also contributed to that benchmark in the 23 counties that make up the metropolitan area: New York’s five boroughs, as well as Nassau, Suffolk, Westchester, Rockland and Putnam Counties, Fairfield County in Connecticut and 12 counties in New Jersey.

In 2000, the census found that non-Hispanic whites made up 54.3 percent of the area’s population. By 2010, their share had declined to 49.6 percent.

“It reflects the way the country is going; it’s becoming more diverse,” said Andrew A. Beveridge, a sociologist at Queens College of the City University of New York. “It’s America now.”

Still, despite the proliferation of other racial and ethnic groups, the New York City area grew the slowest, by 3.1 percent, of the 10 largest metropolitan areas.

In every county except Manhattan and Brooklyn, the population of non-Hispanic whites decreased.

The black population decreased in every borough except Staten Island and in the counties closest to the city, and increased slightly in the suburbs. The number of Asian residents increased in every county in the metropolitan area, while the Hispanic population rose in every county except Manhattan.

From 2000 to 2009, the metropolitan area registered a gain of nearly 400,000 foreign-born residents, pushing their share of the population to 26 percent. Nearly three-fourths of the gain was in the suburbs. (The 2010 census did not count immigrants separately.)

“The same patterns of white — and now black — loss are occurring, with more gains of Hispanics, Asians and others,” William H. Frey, a demographer for the Brookings Institution, said.

“If anything, the white losses are less than last decade, as are the total minority gains. But it appears that both the white losses and minority gains are more concentrated in the suburbs, paving the way for a continuing urbanization of this broad suburban territory.”

Even as the New York metropolitan area has become more diverse as a whole, individual neighborhoods have remained stubbornly resistant to racial integration.

Although housing segregation declined slightly in the New York area since 2000, New York passed Detroit and Chicago to reach second place, behind Milwaukee, in a ranking by Dr. Frey of segregation of blacks and whites.

New York’s persistently high level of housing segregation results from several factors, although a number of them also prevail in other metropolitan areas where integration has increased.

“There was a very long history of strong ethnic boundaries, with a buildup of black and Hispanic — originally Puerto Rican — enclaves in large sections of the city, partly anchored by public housing,” said John R. Logan, a sociologist at Brown University and director of the US2010 Project, a research project at Brown on recent population changes. “The suburbs initially had restrictive covenants in many places, and when some older suburbs became less attractive to whites — such as Hempstead Village — they turned rapidly into minority enclaves, so the old city-versus-suburb segregation was reproduced within suburbia.”

In addition, Professor Logan said, “New York’s labor market has been strongly organized by race and ethnicity, and that may have contributed to the boundaries of where people live.”

Even when factoring in members of disparate racial and ethnic groups who share similarities in characteristics like income and education, said Professor Logan, “the differences in where people live are very stark.”