In this note, we use a consistently defined set of metropolitan areas to study patterns and trends in black hypersegregation from 1970 to 2010. Over this 40-year period, 52 metropolitan areas were characterized by hypersegregation at one point or another, although not all at the same time. Over the period, the number of hypersegregated metropolitan areas declined by about one-half, but the degree of segregation within those areas characterized by hypersegregation changed very little. As of 2010, roughly one-third of all black metropolitan residents lived in a hypersegregated area.

Analysis of trends in the suburbanization of whites, blacks, Asians, and Hispanics reveal that all groups are becoming more suburbanized, though the gap between whites and minorities remains large. Although central cities have made the transition to a majority-minority configuration, suburbs are still overwhelmingly white. Levels of minority-white segregation are nonetheless lower in suburbs than cities. Blacks remain the most segregated group at both locations. Black segregation and isolation levels are declining in cities and suburbs, however, while Hispanic and Asian segregation levels have remained stable and spatial isolation levels have risen. Multivariate analyses suggest that Hispanics achieve desegregation indirectly by using socioeconomic achievements to gain access to less-segregated suburban communities and directly by translating r status attainments into residence in white neighborhoods. Blacks do not achieve desegregation indirectly through suburbanization and they are much less able than Hispanics to use their socioeconomic attainments directly to enter white neighborhoods.

A systematic analysis of residential segregation and spatial interaction by income reveals that as income rises, minority access to integrated neighborhoods, higher levels of interaction with whites, and more affluent neighbors also increase. However, the income payoffs are much lower for African Americans than other groups, especially Asians. Although Hispanics and Asians have always displayed declining levels of minority-white dissimilarity and rising levels of minority-white interaction with rising income, income differentials on these outcomes for blacks did not appear until 1990 and since then have improved at a very slow pace. Given their higher overall levels of segregation and income’s limited effect on residential attainment, African Americans experience less integration, more neighborhood poverty at all levels of income compared to other minority groups. The degree of black spatial disadvantage is especially acute in the nation’s 21 hypersegregated metropolitan areas.

Many technical approaches have been proposed for ensuring that decisions made by machine learning systems are fair, but few of these proposals have been stress-tested in real-world systems. This paper presents an example of one team's approach to the challenge of applying algorithmic fairness approaches to complex production systems within the context of a large technology company. We discuss how we disentangle normative questions of product and policy design (like, "how should the system trade off between different stakeholders' interests and needs?") from empirical questions of system implementation (like, "is the system achieving the desired tradeoff in practice?"). We also present an approach for answering questions of the latter sort, which allows us to measure how machine learning systems and human labelers are making these tradeoffs across different relevant groups. We hope our experience integrating fairness tools and approaches into large-scale and complex production systems will be useful to other practitioners facing similar challenges, and illuminating to academics and researchers looking to better address the needs of practitioners.

Residential segregation has been called the "structural linchpin" of racial stratifi cation in the United States. Recent work has documented the central role it plays in the geographic concentration of poverty among African-Americans as well as the close connection between exposure to concentrated deprivation and limited life chances. Here we review trends in racial segregation and Black poverty to contextualize a broader analysis of trends in the neighborhood circumstances experienced by two groups generally considered to occupy the top and bottom positions in U.S. society: affl uent Whites and poor Blacks. The analysis reveals a sharp divergence of social and economic resources available within the social worlds of the two groups. We tie this divergence directly to the residential segregation of AfricanAmericans in the United States, which remains extreme in the nation's largest urban Black communities. In these communities, the neighborhood circumstances of affl uent as well as poor African-Americans are systematically compromised.