Black Movement to the Suburbs : Potentials and Prospects for Metropolitan Wide Integration. Discussion Papers No. 452-77 / William H. Frey.

This paper investigates the recent pace of metropolitan-wide integration as it is related to the demographic processes of residential mobility and migration. It also examines the prospects for future changes in this pace. These changes could create a substantial "opening" of the suburbs for blacks. The findings of the study suggest that constraints that had prevented blacks from locating in suburban destinations to the same degree as whites in the late 1950's continued to operate in the late 1960's and that the aggregate redistribution resulting from these constraints serves to reinforce existing city-suburb racial segregation patterns. It is also suggested that an immediate and complete elimination of racial discrimination toward suburban entry would bring about short term increases in black suburbanization that are well above existing levels. However, these immediate increases would fall far short of the goal of metropolitanwide racial integration. The findings also suggest that the elimination of residential segregation patterns which have evolved over decades of discrimination will, at best, occur at a slow and gradual pace.

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