Distinguished Sociology Professor John Logan

>>> For months now, University at Albany sociologist John Logan and a team of graduate students have been busy analyzing 2000 census data, and dozens of national and international news organizations across the United States have been picking up on the story. Logan’s research builds on the work he’s done over many years studying neighborhood segregation patterns, as well as a dizzying array of computer calculations by his talented student programmers. Still, for all the complexity of the research, Logan’s bottom-line conclusions about the census data are remarkably simple. Indeed, one could say Logan’s findings are as simple as black and white.

In a report that surprised the nation, Logan has shown that even though the U.S. population grew far more racially and ethnically diverse between 1990 and 2000, we are still as segregated a nation today as we’ve ever been. The majority of Americans, Logan found, are living in neighborhoods that continue to separate whites from blacks, Latinos and people of Asian descent. In fact, the same color barrier that has dominated urban communities for decades has now spread to our fast-growing suburbs, where people of color tend to congregate in neighborhoods and housing developments apart from whites.

“We need to be aware,” says Logan, a distinguished professor and director of the University’s Lewis Mumford Center for Comparative Urban and Regional Research, “that segregation is not going away by itself. And that it hasn’t been solved by the growth of the black middle class, the softening of white attitudes on race, or the laws that prohibit racial discrimination in housing. These are all factors that might have had a positive effect on segregation, and the assumption has been that they must have had an effect. But it’s very important to realize that they have not.”

Among Logan’s other findings:

>>> The average white person lives in a community nearly 83 percent white and 7 percent black, while the average black lives in a community that is only 33 percent white and 54 percent black.

>>> Middle-class blacks are more likely to live in or near areas of poverty than are middle-class whites of equal income. In Los Angeles, Chicago and New York City, for example, the typical African American lives in a community where the income level is about 30 percent lower, and where the crime rate is 30 percent higher, than it is in communities occupied by whites of the same income level.

>>> White couples without children are more likely to live in integrated neighborhoods than are whites with children, reflecting the departure of white families from urban areas into the suburbs, often in pursuit of better schools and less crime.

>>> The average child in metropolitan America lives in an increasingly segregated neighborhood where their own racial group dominates, and where they encounter relatively few children of other backgrounds. As neighborhoods are segregated, so too are schools, clubs, sports teams and other organizations and social circles.

Logan’s work with the Mumford researchers has been recent front-page news in newspapers from San Jose, Calif., to South Orange, N.J. The story hit virtually every national daily, too, with several appearances in USA Today, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, and The Christian Science Monitor. NBC News, National Public Radio, Australian Broad-casting and even Radio Free Europe have also picked up on the Mumford report.

Fueled in part by the availability of a clear, colorful and boldly easy-to-read web page (http://www.albany.edu/mumford/census), the Mumford Center has been swamped with attention. In March, the web site’s data pages attracted nearly 10,000 hits, and another 16,000 hits in the first half of April. Web traffic really picked up after Logan joined with Harvard’s Civil Rights Project at a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. April 3.

Reporters on tight deadlines, like Haya El Nasser, of USA Today, flocked to the web site, recognizing it as “a wonderful resource for those of us covering the Census data that was pouring out at the rate of three to six states a day during the month of March. It was almost instantaneous.

“John is good at highlighting significant changes in segregation, identifying patterns and trends. He was also helpful when we wanted to look at how the sudden presence of Hispanics in some metro areas affected segregation.”

Reporter Mike Swift of The Hartford Courant said Logan was a willing teacher. “Racial segregation has been a big issue for us here in Connecticut, which in recent decades has been typified by minority cities surrounded by white suburbs. We knew that one of the big stories of the 2000 Census would be the growth of minorities in the suburbs. But looking at the overall numbers for towns can be highly deceptive because minorities have tended to see growth in only a few suburbs, and even then in a relatively few neighborhoods of those supposedly ‘integrated’ towns. Dr. Logan’s research allowed us to talk in much more fine-grained detail about what actually happened — that although there are double the number of minorities in Hartford’s suburbs, the typical white suburbanite is not much more likely to be living next door to somebody of a different race.”

Other visitors to the web page have included re-searchers from more than 100 universities across the U.S., housing and economic development organizations, and members of the U.S. Senate, Department of Justice, and Department of Housing and Urban Development, as well as visitors from 13 foreign countries.

A poll released by the Pew Research Center for People and the Press shows that by mid-April, 50 percent of Americans had heard that “neighborhoods are still mostly racially segregated.” And more than 70 percent of Americans said they considered this “a bad thing.”

Logan’s findings have come as a surprise to most Americans. “We all knew the census would show a great increase in diversity,” he says. “But if that was the only story that had been reported, that wouldn’t have been a fair representation of what we knew was happening.”

In the first couple months of this year, Logan and a small, but dedicated group of doctoral students were busy putting the finishing touches on the computer software that would calculate, for each metropolitan area, specific indexes showing the level of segregation in a particular community. They also designed, practically overnight, that portion of the Mumford web site that would deliver the census analyses. His team included Deirdre Oakley of Williamstown, Mass.; Brian Stults of Kalamazoo, Mich.; Jake Stowell of San Diego, Calif., Vadivel Kumari of Thirunelveli, South India, and Charles Zhang of Beijing, China.

The Census Bureau released the data one state at a time throughout the month of March. Each day or two, the Mumford team would update their web site, interpreting the latest set of information and re-evaluating the trends that were developing. With a click of a button, analyses for hundreds of metropolitan areas became available to eager reporters, researchers and policy makers from Albany to Abilene, Tex., and from Anchorage, Alaska, to Yuma, Arizona.

Logan, at computer, with his team of doctoral students. Sitting: Jin Lee and Susan McHenry. Alone on right, Dehui Wei. Standing, from left: Polly Smith, Deirdre Oakley, Matt Yeager, Yongzhen Zhang, Jacob Stowell, Vadivel Kumari, Charles Zhang (behind Kumari), and Brian Stults.

A self-professed “critical urban theorist,” Logan doesn’t miss an opportunity to raise awareness about racial segregation, and its destructive effects.

“We as a society reinforce inequality between peoples based on race and class,” he says. “These inequalities are reflected in unequal schools, in unequal exposure to crime and in unequal access to health care.” It will take an act of political and social will to correct the situation, Logan says. “As long as we maintain segregation, separate but unequal is a condition that cannot be allowed to stand,” he says. “We must be committed to make these neighborhoods livable for the people confined to them. We must address the schools, and the crime, and the public health of the people living there.”

Claudia Ricci, Ph.D.’96, teaches English and reading and writing courses in Academic Support Services at the University. She has completed two novels, Dreaming Maples and Eyes on Orion, and is at work on a third.