A Chicagoan working at a downtown library noticed her black coworkers all tended to head home to the South Side after work while her white coworkers went north. She asked Chicago's Public Radio station (WBEZ) if the city was becoming more segregated.
Overall, Chicago has become less segregated in the last 27 years, Census data shows, but different neighborhoods tell very different stories. For example, while some Near North Side areas have become more exclusively white, the city’s far Northwest Side has become more integrated. "The black-white index of dissimilarity in 2010 in Chicago was 82.5, meaning nearly 83 percent of the city’s black and white residents would have to move to a different part of the city in order to achieve integration across the city. But in 1990, it was 88.5, so there’s been a slight improvement," according to reporting from Adeshina Emmanuel, Carolina Cruz, and Reuben Unrau on WBEZ.
"But while the data suggests there are six more integrated communities in Chicago today than there were in the 1990s, the maps and the numbers don’t tell us if residents actually feel integrated," Emmanuel, Cruz, and Unrau contend.
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