2016 Metropolitan Equity Report Card
Photo George Miquilena
This working paper uses recent data from the American Community Survey to look at how African-Americans, Latinos, and women fare when compared to Whites and men in each of the nation’s 374 metropolitan areas on ten equity and opportunity categories, including: residential segregation, poverty, household income, homeownership, unemployment, educational attainment, residential over-crowding, job mobility, and transit dependency.
Among places with more than one million people, the metropolitan areas that garnered the highest overall grades for African-Americans in 2016 included Riverside-San Bernardino in California, San Antonio, Tucson, Jacksonville, and Las Vegas. Jacksonville and Riverside-San Bernardino also topped the equity opportunity list for Latinos, along with Norfolk, New Orleans, and Pittsburgh. For women, Sacramento, Providence, Las Vegas, Minneapolis, and Tampa-St. Petersburg offered the best mix of opportunities. Similar rankings are presented for medium-sized and smaller metropolitan areas, as well as for the most-improved metro areas since 2005.
This is the first paper to look at multiple groups across so many equity areas for all of the nation’s metropolitan areas.