Neighborhood Racial/Ethnic Segregation in North Carolina

North Carolina

Different areas across the United States have different environmental characteristics and levels of access to opportunities and resources. Residential segregation restricts socioeconomic mobility, affecting equitable proximity and access to quality schools, good jobs and healthy food and leading to health disparities. Segregation can also create areas of concentrated exposure to physical and environmental hazards such as unsafe housing conditions and industrial pollution.

Black communities in the U.S. are more likely than Hispanic or Asian communities to be segregated from white communities. Furthermore, Black/white residential segregation among native-born citizens is nearly three times higher in the U.S. compared with Great Britain. As segregation rates increase, Black men in particular experience more acute differences in social class.

Schools and neighborhoods with children tend to have higher rates of racial segregation than the general population — white households with children have the highest levels of segregation from Black, Hispanic and Asian households. Living in more segregated neighborhoods has been associated with poorer self-rated health among both Black and white children.

Strategies to reduce segregation and its impact include:

• Promoting racial equity in housing and community development by integrating equitable practices for transparency, community engagement and collaborative planning into affordable housing strategies, such as housing choice voucher programs.
• Removing zoning laws. Single-family zoning laws create and reinforce segregation.
• Improving public transit safety and accessibility. Public transit safety and accessibility are lower in segregated neighborhoods, and many segregated communities are divided by highway systems, limiting mobility. 
• Establishing affordable housing options for segregated communities throughout metropolitan areas. 
• Implementing place-based special purpose credit programs that enable banks to extend favorable credit to economically disadvantaged borrowers with common characteristics (the special purpose), such as race or income, in distinct geographic areas. 
• Supporting shared equity homeownership programs, which control the resale price of affordable housing each time it is sold to maintain housing affordability in a community.

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