Is L.A. Becoming Less Segregated?

In the 1990s, L.A. became a poster child for racial segregation when riots following the acquittal of Rodney King’s killers brought attention to the city’s black-white divide. But since then, L.A. has come a long way, according to a new geographical analysis published in the journal Annals of the Association of American Geographers.

The study confirms what Census-block analyses have found: in the 2000s, the share of L.A.’s total population living in super-segregated neighborhoods (defined here as those made up predominantly of one racial group) decreased from 40 percent down to a third. In a blog post for the London School of Economics and Political Science, the researchers write that L.A. neighborhoods exhibit a lack of “demographic stability,” which has helped increase the overall diversity in the city: